Break My Fall
by winter machine
Summary: What if they kept on singing love songs, just to break their own fall? Old school, vintage, New York Maddison, starting pre-show and extending into Season 2. Short, multi-chaptered, and complete. For Rach, with Maddison love and fandom squalor.
1. Prologue

**A/N: So ... this is old-school, vintage-style Maddison - the result of a prompt that I'll tell you at the end and my constant, futile attempts to make sense of the Season 1/2/3 timeline. Spoiler you all probably know: there's no real way to make sense of it. It really only makes sense if Derek was gone from New York for more than two months, so I took the "we lived together for two months" and the overcoat Derek wore in the flashback and this story grew out of that. It's complete, and I'm posting all of it tonight in a handful of chapters, which will vary in length.**

**This is a Mark/Addison story. Fans of that pairing, enjoy. If you don't like that pairing, you'll find plenty of others on my page and everyone else's. As always, thank you for reading. **

**Posting tonight to stop myself from overthinking it. Rach, you inspired this story and, let's be real, all my Maddison. ** **Happy late and early birthday.**

* * *

**Break My Fall - **_Prologue_

* * *

_He has this theory that it's all about the calendar. _

_You could say a calendar is how it all started and even if it didn't that's how he'll remember it: in squares of time crossed out in black. _

_Pages flipped between months and pictures that change with the seasons. Frozen airbrushed shots of flowery springs and glowing summers and perfect white winters that look nothing like his memories. _

_When did it start? What he knows is that it was cold. Unseasonably cold._

_(He was forced to take three credits of college English for pre-med and scammed his way into an upper-level creative writing course, mainly because the TA was – coincidentally, also – hot. She told them, never start by talking about the weather. No one cares about the weather.)_

_But if he were the kind of guy who kept track of this stuff – which, first of all, he isn't, that's Addison's area, cataloguing and scrapbooking and memories – he would break it up like that._

_Seasons. _

_Which means he wouldn't be able to talk about it without the weather. That first blast of unseasonal cold that killed everything new. And the sticky summer that followed: holding his breath past garbage piles and steaming subway grates, her blouses stuck to her ribs with sweat and the salt that would gather at the dip of her collarbones._

_Maybe that's why he kept the calendar long after he stopped needing it. Long after it lost its relevance._

_(December 31, every year, a calendar becomes nothing more than a memory.)_


	2. Spring

**SPRING**

* * *

_April_

* * *

The meteorologists have some fancy name for it, but _freak blizzard _is good enough for him.

Just like that, the temperature drops, the skies open up, and the hospital fills with patients who weren't ready to skid on the ice or slip on a subway grate or spin out at an intersection.

The spring that had already started screeches to a halt.

Outside, the new leaves on branches across the city curl up and die. They don't fall, they just – hang there.

"It's weird." She's standing there with her head tilted back far enough that her long hair is brushing the wool belt on her coat, just looking up at a tree – surrounded by a little metal fence, _please curb your dog_, even the tiniest of gardens needs protection here. "Look at the leaves. They just grew and now they're already dead."

He places a hand on the back of her coat to move her, slightly, so cranky pedestrians can brush by. To the last one, they're talking about the snow. The cold. The icy pavement in April – _April! _They all say it that way, with italics and an exclamation point too.

Addison is still preoccupied with the tree. "The leaves are actually weirder than the snow, when you really think about it."

He doesn't answer; he's not sure what to say. Maybe doesn't want to _really think_ about anything.

"Are you still coming over tonight?" she asks.

"Derek said he had to work."

"I know." She puts out a gloved hand and touches one of the new dead leaves. "But you can come over anyway, if you want."

They eat Thai takeout on the couch and she throws a folded blanket over her legs and then tosses him one too. He teases her, something about how soft the blanket is – _girly_ cashmere – and she teases him right back: _men get cold too _and _you're really not man enough for a cashmere blanket? _

Something changes in the air that night.

Nothing happens, everything is the same, but something changes.

When he wakes up the blare of the radio the weather guy confirms it: _Folks, I think we've seen the last of that unseasonable cold. _

The weather guy chuckles a little then, like all of this is funny to him.

...

He finds her in the attendings' lounge on his way to meet a new blonde anesthesiologist he's had his eye on.

Chin in her hand, red hair covering half her face.

"What are you still doing here?" he asks.

"I work here," she says when she looks up, like they're a Vaudeville duo.

He makes a face at her and she makes one back and for just that second they're back in medical school in the library cracking weak jokes to stay awake.

"What are _you_ doing here?" she counters.

"Maybe I was looking for you." He says it lightly and expects her to roll her eyes or swat him with a clipboard as she's wont to do. She's his best friend's wife; they've had years to negotiate the boundaries of friendly flirtation.

"At least someone is looking for me." She tilts her head slightly. "Am I invisible?" she asks.

"Invisible? You?" He's amused; she's not.

He tries again. "You're not invisible, Addison. You are … very visible."

Her eyes are still downcast, so she probably doesn't notice his eyes, which are tracking down the _very visible _shape of her. She's wearing a shiny blouse that dips a little between her collarbones; the sad C shape of her back hollows out her spine so he can follow the trail of tiny pearl buttons all the way into the waist of her black skirt. One long leg is crossed over the other; one very high heel is dangerously close to slipping off her dangling foot. It's only an inch or so away from falling; he can see the high arch of her instep and he can see the moment her foot flexes to try to keep the shoe on.

It falls anyway.

She laughs a little, surprised, and he does too even though he's not. When she raises her eyes they're glistening.

"I got it," he tells her; he kneels on the floor to pick up the shoe. "These things are ridiculous."

"They're not ridiculous." She's looking down at him where he kneels in front of her. "They're great shoes."

They're great shoes. They're great legs that he's trained to notice only neutrally.

"Mark," she says, "you don't have to – " but he's already picked up her foot to put her shoe on it, kidding around, saying something about Cinderella.

His thumb brushes her instep and he feels the jerk of her flesh against his hand.

"Sorry," he says, releasing her.

When he looks up again she's looking down, her lower lip caught between her teeth. "No, I'm sorry," she says. "I'm, uh, I'm ticklish."

The word _ticklish_ gets to him a little – it's so jovial, even juvenile, which wasn't what it felt like when she flinched at the contact with his hand.

It felt like someone who hasn't been touched in too long.

_Ticklish_ is for children.

She doesn't say anything else.

Tentatively he reaches out again, waiting for her ever-so-slight nod. She inhales sharply when his fingers touch her skin – the cold snap is gone, the spring is here, her legs are bare.

"Mark – "

"It's okay," he says, not sure why, but it seems to work because she goes quiet.

Then all that's left to do is circle a delicate ankle with one hand and, with the other, slide the shoe carefully over her foot.

"There you go." He sits back a little on his knees. "It fits. Guess you can marry the prince after all."

She makes a face at him.

"Then again … I guess you already did that."

He's not mocking, it's nothing he hasn't teased her about before. Teased both of them.

"The prince I married forgot we had dinner plans," she says. "That's why I'm … still here."

"Ah." He gets to his feet in one movement; he sees her watching him. He has the height advantage now, and he waits for her to look up. The angle changes her face, giving him a view of the long column of her throat, the tilted shape of her jaw. It means he can see the flat plane of her chest above the silk collar where a flush starts to rise. He's not doing anything. Just – looking.

"He's working," she adds, a defensive note in her voice.

Of course he is.

"Mark," she says softly.

"The prince may be too busy to eat," he interrupts before she can continue. "But his footman is hungry."

"His footman." She laughs. "Is that what you are?"

He shrugs a little, ready to let go of the game. "What do you say? Want to grab some dinner?"

She pauses for a minute during which he realizes he's holding his breath.

"Sure." She smiles and it changes the shape of her face yet again. "That would be nice."

They're halfway through a bottle of red, he's holding a piece of that fancy coal-oven pizza she likes, when he remembers that he went to the lounge in the first place to find that blonde.

...

The thing is that he's spent almost sixteen years as a moon in orbit around _DerekAndAddison_ and not that much has changed. Everyone's hair looks a little better now. They command respect from interns instead of getting yelled at by attendings. They're the attendings now: such is life in a hospital.

It's cyclical.

Nothing has changed, not really, so he's not sure why he feels a strange hollow sensation when he sees her standing by the nurses' desk a fraction of an inch from her husband, head tilted, looking up at him. They're the same height in her heels so she doesn't have to tilt her head to see him; briefly, he wonders whether she's doing it on purpose to make him feel taller, or to make herself look … smaller, or whether it's a conscious choice at all.

Maybe it's instinctual: shrinking herself.

For some reason, the thought makes him sad.

She leans in and kisses him and he sees Derek's hand that was resting on the pager at his hip move to curl around her waist. She doesn't flinch.

"Break it up, break it up," he says, mimicking the bluster of their first chief resident. That guy was always on the lookout for interns wasting time. "There's work to be done."

Addison flushes a little when she pulls back.

Mark hasn't actually seen them together in weeks, but Derek looks comfortable, from his perspective, mapping the shape of her hip with his hand. He studies the v-shaped neck of her dress, lets his gaze drift a few inches south, and she sees him looking.

He thinks she'll scold him or act annoyed or fold her arms over her chest like she would in medical school, when they were all kids, and he hadn't yet figured out how to stare without being obvious.

She doesn't. She stands there almost brazen under his gaze.

She stands there, his eyes pinning her, while Derek's blackberry buzzes and he hefts it with his free hand to read the message. He continues absently tracing Addison's hip but Mark can see his attention drift until the hand on her is still. It's just resting there like she's no different from his pager, while he scrolls his blackberry.

There's a flush in her cheeks that tells him she hasn't missed this.

For long moments the three of them just stand there, frozen.

Finally, Addison speaks: _Derek_, she says quietly.

Just that, just his name.

Derek looks up from his blackberry and smiles at her. "Sorry, Addie. I should get back."

_To what_, Mark doesn't ask.

He watches his best friend kiss his wife on the cheek, toss out a friendly _Mark_ along with a head nod, acknowledging his departure, and then he's gone.

Addison is still leaning against the nurses desk, a hand on either side of her. He sees the blood drain from her visible knuckles. That's how hard she's gripping it.

She sighs, swallows and he can see it in the movement of her throat. He's not really reading her, not on purpose; either he's a better reader than he used to be or she's so transparent these days he doesn't need much help.

_Am I invisible? _That's what she asked him in the lounge that day.

He can't stop looking.

He lets his gaze settle on the visible evidence of her breath, the soft rise and fall of her chest through the thin patterned fabric of her dress. She does nothing to stop him.

He thinks about what it would feel like to touch that fabric – slip a finger under it, find the soft skin it's hiding. Addison is always complaining she's cold and in his experience her hands are chilly, yes, but he's never felt the skin she's hiding.

Something tells him it would be warm.

"Addison."

She looks up at him, her eyes big and wary.

"I see you," he says.

...

It's grey and drizzly the night he knocks on the door of the brownstone holding a bottle of wine.

He has a key but he never uses it. That's his version of _I never inhaled_; that's just how it is.

"Coals to Newcastle?" Addison asks when she opens the door, raising an eyebrow and indicating the bottle in his hand.

"I wasn't sure if you had any left."

"Very funny." She stands aside to let him in. There's a fat globe of a wineglass on the hall table – with a coaster, obviously, but if she's carting the thing around like Amy used to with that grubby security blanket, that's probably not a great sign.

"Is Derek here?"

He asks it like that: casually. Like he doesn't care either way.

"Derek is not here." She takes a sip of her wine. "Derek is in surgery being perfect and I am in … _here _being imperfect."

"Who says you're imperfect?"

"Don't." She points a finger at him, shaking her head. "Don't use lines on me, Mark."

"That wasn't a line."

He gestures to her glass. "How many have you had?"

"This is only my second, believe it or not."

"I believe it." After fifteen years he's pretty familiar with the various stages of her blood alcohol levels.

"Did you come to see Derek?" she asks. Her voice is a little throaty.

"He's not here," Mark says.

It's not an answer to her question. And she's far too smart not to notice.

She just tilts her head back a little to look in his eyes while he studies her face.

Her lips are stained burgundy from the wine.

That's what she must have looking for before – a napkin to pat her lips, which is all … Montgomery-polite or whatever but also would have prevented this.

"What?" She smiles a little, self-consciously.

"Nothing," he says.

But she's already running a thumb over her lower lip. Which is bad because it just calls more attention to her mouth.

"Red wine stains."

"Yeah." He's very close. He can see the curl of her eyelashes and the shape of her skin, the way it settles over her cheekbones. "Well, stains come out."

"Not all of them," she says.

"You could go wash it off."

That's what he says, and later he can reassure himself when he catches a glimpse of his sorry self in the mirror or reflected from the glass of a store window, _I tried to stop it. That was me. I offered to pump the brakes._

"I could." She looks at him, her eyes huge and heavy-lidded and he hears her breathing change, just a little bit but it's noticeable.

She starts to stand up; he starts to exhale.

Nothing's going to happen. They're safe.

"You could come with me."

He looks up, surprised at her words. She's extending a hand to him. Which is nothing, a _hand_, he's held far more than that over the years without a care.

It's her left hand, though. It sparkles.

He covers it with his bigger hand, ostensibly so he won't have to see her stupid rings.

At the foot of the stairs, she lets go.

He brushes the jacket he hung on the banister before, and it falls to the floor as they ascend the stairs.

The _floor_, and she doesn't say anything, doesn't stop him or pick it up herself, and that's somehow more shocking to him than whatever might be at the top of the stairs.

He just follows her up a few paces behind, his heart pounding. This is what _almost_ looks like, he reminds himself. This is _could have_, this is _didn't_, and a better man would have grasped onto that. Maybe.

Would have saved himself and her too.

But he follows her into her bedroom, a little uncertain though he's certainly been here before. She disappears into the attached bathroom for a moment. He hears water running, but when she comes back out again her mouth looks the same.

"You didn't wash it off," he says stupidly.

"No. I didn't." She stands in front of him, looking up at him under her lashes. In bare feet, the distance between them, the vertical distance – is nothing like when he passes her in the halls at work. This is her almost bared, no heels, no makeup, not even scrubs and a white coat.

It feels warm in their bedroom – it smells like something he can't quite identify that he's picked up on her before, a light scent, probably something she gets the housekeeper to do. Clean, but a little more than that. More … particular, like she's marked their territory. Some of these evenings he's spent with her, chaste though they might be, he still goes home with that citrusy scent on his clothes.

He's wondered before what it would taste like on his tongue.

Or on hers. Her mouth that's been distracting him the better part of two decades is inches from his now. He's focused on that stupid wine stain, on the darkness tracing her bottom lip. When he looks up at her eyes again he knows it's over.

"Mark," she says.

Just once.

Just his name, just once, before he crosses what's left of the space between them and throws everything to the wind for the first taste of her wine-stained mouth.

...

It's fast.

He says, _what are we doing? _

She says, _I don't care. _

Addison always cares, though.

She backs him into the edge of the mattress and later he'll wonder if the bed – AddisonAndDerek's bed – was _don't care _or _care too much. _Wonder about whether those are two sides of the same coin or the same thing. But he can't wonder now, he can't _think_ now because he was right, before.

Under everything that was covering her … she's warm.

He marvels at that warmth, and at the strength of her when she arches under him, draws him in greedily with powerful legs; there's no time for finesse.

Not now.

It's all too clear how long it's been since someone wanted her like this.

He tastes the wine on her. Salt, too, her head thrown back and his lips on her neck. Her whole body seizes against his like her foot in his hand that day in the lounge.

Around them, that citrus scent is clinging to the bedsheets – flannel, they're flannel, and there's something weirdly Christmas-y about them.

_It's been cold,_ that's what she says when she catches him running a hand over the fabric.

A comfort thing. Okay, he gets that. Like the wine he's drunk from her mouth. Like all of it, maybe. He runs that same hand up one of her endless legs and when she comes apart around his fingers it's almost too much.

Almost.

_It's been cold._

But it's not cold now; he's buried in her warmth, finally, and she's gripping him so tightly the friction is almost unbearable.

Together they build so much heat against the flannel sheets he thinks they might burn it all down.

And then Derek walks in … and then everything burns.

...

_Go, please just go, Mark, please just go! _

She says it over and over like a prayer. Still naked, pushing on his chest, _get dressed and go, I'm sorry, just please, you have to go. Please. Just go!_

He doesn't realize how cold he is until he shoves forgotten clothes back over his skin.

The whole house is cold now.

Derek is – somewhere, breathing cold fire and Mark takes the stairs carefully like maybe the guy he's known practically his whole life is waiting to … choke him out or something.

He's not.

He sees him, standing by the inset bar in the hall of the foyer, where he's poured a hundred scotches. He's still wearing his coat, breathing heavily enough that the back of it is moving in jagged rhythm. Up and down.

And then Derek sees _him_.

No. He looks right through him.

"Derek – "

"Just go," he says, his voice like ice, and the door's already closed behind him before he can contemplate whether it means anything that Derek's two parting words were Addison's, too.

_Just go_.

He goes.

...

She doesn't call and he paces a little, waiting, unsure so that when his phone finally rings it actually startles him.

"Come over," she says but he hears _just go_.

" …because it went so well the last time?"

It's bravado so hard even he can tell, and it falls away at the congested breaths staggering down the phone line. She's been crying.

"Addison."

"He's gone," she says.

"He'll be back."

"Only for his things."

She doesn't say, _my life is over._ She doesn't say, _it's your fault._

He inhales. "You sure you want me to – "

"Just come over," she says again. "Please. He won't be back until the morning."

He holds the phone tightly without moving until she says _please_, and then he goes. He hails a cab in rain that dampens his hair – maybe he should have showered, when he got home, but he couldn't bring himself to wash off the scent of her.

...

The brownstone when he gets there is hollow with _something happened_.

Like there should be yellow crime scene tape. Clicking flashbulbs, and people shaking their heads.

There's a pile of – fabric, is it clothing? A damp pile, in the foyer. He's confused until he sees the crumpled flannel sheets.

Addison is shaking, he can see it, but she doesn't touch him. She's still wearing the tee shirt he pulled off of her hours before and –

"Are those ski pants?" he asks, confused.

She looks down. "No. Yeah. They, uh – " She points to the hall closet. "I couldn't go back up there," she says. "I needed pants, I needed pants but I couldn't go back up there to get pants, so I got these pants."

Her words come fast, skipping over each other breathlessly and he pulls her close for a moment, ski pants and all – they make a loud rustling sound like he's unwrapping a present.

Her heart beats through the thin material of her shirt; against his skin, hers is warm.

"Did you talk to him?" he asks into the damp strands of her hair.

She draws back. "I tried."

He glances at the pile of fabric. _I needed pants_, that's what she said, so she must have gone outside.

"He threw your stuff out," he says slowly, putting it together.

"Yeah." She shoves her hair behind her ears. "My stuff."

Her face is swollen from tears but still recognizable. She looks so miserable that he tries to hold her again but she pushes him back.

_You told me to come over_, that's what he wants to say, _this is your show._

He doesn't.

He helps her put the sheets in the laundry bag for the housekeeper like it's an ordinary day and then watches as she ties up thousands of dollars of clothing in black garbage bags.

"You're throwing them out?"

"They're ruined," she says. "What else am I going to do?"

He gestures to the laundry bag.

"The sheets can be washed. That's different."

A lot of things are different.

She's moving fast and jittery now, straightening things up – nothing is out of order, she's already done away with the damage.

Except then she's slowing down again, she's at the little built-in bar and she's holding Derek's scotch glass between her hands.

Staring.

He watches as she puts her lips around the rim of the glass. There's nothing in it, but she tips her head back anyway, as if she's drinking.

"Addison."

She looks up at her name. Her eyes are bleary. "Take the garbage bags to the curb, will you?" she asks hoarsely. "On your way out."

...

He doesn't see her at work the next day.

She must be there, Addison is always working, but he doesn't catch so much as a swinging glimpse of her ponytail. The closest he comes is seeing her name on the board.

So she's avoiding him.

He can't exactly blame her.

And Derek?

"He had to go out of town," that's what the chief tells him, impassively. "It was unexpected."

Maybe.

Maybe not, if he'd been paying attention.

He stops by Addison's office but it's locked, darkened, the shade drawn like she's mourning something.

...

The intercom beeps into his thoughts that night. "I have Addison here for you," the doorman says.

He always phrases it like that. Deliveries, whatever.

But he hears it differently tonight. He hears _for you._

It's almost eleven o'clock.

He has the door open before she gets to it. She's standing there in a trench coat with all her hair stuffed into a stretchy wool winter hat that's all wrong for the spring.

Or whatever this is.

There are deep shadows under her eyes; she looks miserable, and he should say something reassuring.

"Cold outside, or are you going into hiding?"

_Good work, Sloan. Very reassuring._

She just shrugs out of her trench and hands it to him. Underneath she's dressed casually, a sweater he's seen a dozen times before and jeans that look completely different now that his hands have mapped every part of her endless legs.

She pulls off the hat.

He stares.

"You're … blonde," he says.

"Yeah." She touches it gingerly. "I wanted something different."

It's definitely that.

"What do you think?" she asks, her tone uncertain.

Like she's asking him about a new dress. Like her nose isn't still faintly swollen at the sides – too subtle for most people to notice, maybe, but it doesn't miss him – from all her tears the night before and probably some today too.

What does he think?

The color doesn't really suit her. It's too brassy and her skin is too fair, her coloring too delicate. The shade washes her out – like someone's stripped the brightness from makes the perfect auburn of her eyebrows look too dark, like she's faking something.

"It looks great," he lies.

She raises one eyebrow and doesn't respond.

"Did you see Derek?"

Slowly, she nods.

"And?" he prompts.

"And … I saw him." She looks down at her hands; the left catches the light from overhead.

"What did he say?"

"He didn't. Not really."

"What does that – "

"He packed," she says. "He packed and he left."

"Where did he – "

"I don't know."

Then she fishes in the back pocket of her jeans and holds something up. A little flash of gold, a thicker band than hers.

Derek's ring.

Mark was one responsible for it, on their wedding day. The best man.

_I just hope you didn't forget the rings._

He had to corral the sticky-fingered little nephew tasked with bearing that ring on a pillow Derek's mother grudgingly gave them. But ultimately Mark was responsible. He had Derek's ring and Addison's too and when the pastor said "the rings?" it was Mark's job to hand them over. To make it official.

Without the rings, there would have been no marriage at all.

"He left his ring?" Mark asks.

"Left it … threw it … whatever." Addison's mouth twists into something like a half smile. Her lips are pink and anxious, he must have kissed off all the wine, before, when she was undulating beneath him and whispering his name.

His best friend's wife.

_Derek, you're lucky to have me._

She's standing there in a sweater and jeans but she'll never be clothed again, not really, not now that he's confirmed the warmth of every inch of hidden skin.

_You will never, ever find another friend as good as me, ever._

Mark didn't forget the rings, that day.

Derek forgot his. Or left it, rather. No – _threw _it.

"He threw it at you?" he clarifies, uneasy.

"Not at me. No." She shakes her head. "He just … threw it."

Mark studies the ring. He watches as Addison plays with it, slipping it onto one of her fingers and then another, trying to fit it. Middle finger, pointer finger, thumb. His band is much bigger. Her fingers are surprisingly small – her hands are broad, even large, but her fingers are slim enough that the size differential in their wedding rings was obvious, the day he had to pull them off that embroidered pillow.

_Derek, you're lucky to have me._

She twists Derek's ring around; it still doesn't fit.

"Addison."

She looks up, still holding his ring on her thumb.

But he doesn't know what to say.

"You really think the blonde looks good?" she asks after a moment.

"Yeah. It looks good."

She sighs a little. "You're not a very good liar, Mark."

Really?

Sometimes, it seems like his whole life is a lie.

Maybe he's just not very good at life.

...

"You can stay," he tells the back of her; she's sitting on the end of the bed with shame all over her posture.

"I can't," she says. "I shouldn't."

She doesn't turn around but doesn't stop him, either, when he starts to trail his lips up the damp ladder of her spine. She tastes salty. Sweat and tears and her breathless voice in his ear: _Mark. Mark, please. _

For the last three nights she's been stopping by his apartment. It's always ended the same way: in his bed, naked, her bowed head as she sits on the edge of the mattress.

Maybe she hates herself as much as he does now.

(Hates _him_self. He could never hate her, he doesn't think.)

Her muscles are tense under his mouth and he stops.

"Addison. Why do you want to go back there?"

"I live there," she says. There's a catch in her voice like she's trying to be funny, _I work here_, she said that night in the lounge when he held his thumb against her the pulse of her ankle and needed more.

"Derek's gone."

"I know that."

And then she's crying, and it's his fault. He holds her against his bare skin with nothing in mind except comfort until she turns in his arms and kisses him fiercely. She feels breathless and frantic, almost angry, doing most of the work until she collapses over him.

He traces the knobs of her spine and waits for her to speak.

She doesn't, she's pulling at him again – wanting something, wanting more; he cradles her in the crook of one arm and uses the other to ease the tension between her thighs.

Her body tightens like a bow and then finally relaxes with a great rush of breath.

"You okay?" He kisses her damp cheeks.

"Yeah." She turns to gaze at him. "I'm tired," she admits.

"Stay, then," he says, but she doesn't.

...

He passes her in the hall at work, her disarmingly blonde ponytail swinging like a secret, and he thinks about taking that hank of hair in his hand and dragging her head back, scraping his teeth along her neck. He's not angry, he's just – hungry, and when she shows up at his door that night, predictably, with just that leather weekender thing like she's paying a social call, he grabs her hard.

_Mark_, she says, just that, just his name.

He lifts her against his body without speaking and she drops the bag to wrap her thighs around his waist. He can already feel the heat of her through the crisp slacks she wore to work.

On the couch tonight, not the bed, he holds that same fluttering pulse in her ankle to prop it on his shoulder, to hear her gasp and her back arch against the cushions. She says his name again, _Mark_, but there's something wrong with the fabric, friction or something, so that he has to shift their bodies. He pulls her against him instead, the back of her flat against the front of him, hoists one of her endless legs and fills her so completely he pauses for a minute to make sure she's still game.

"It's okay. _Mark_," she gasps when he doesn't move, and repeats herself: _it's okay. _

He holds her close with one arm bracing the other so that the pulsing points of them are in constant, thrashing contact and then he slides one hand down to provide the pressure he's already learned by heart. She contracts so hard against him that he can't stop his teeth from scraping her slippery shoulder. Her cry pushes him over the edge and then they just lie there, sticky and sated, on the leather couch she used to tease him about.

_You bachelor, _she'd say. _No girl will marry you with a couch like this. _

He would just laugh. _Monogamy is unnatural, Addison. One woman, for the rest of my life? It's not what God intended._

_God gave Adam one woman,_ she would remind him.

_Yeah, and look how well that turned out. _

When she starts to move away from him he pulls her back. She still has that ponytail he used to think was prissy and now thinks anything but, though it's mussed from the twisting of her head.

"Stay," he says.

His fingers slide through her like water. She's boneless in his arms.

"… _you_ didn't stay," she says so quietly he almost doesn't hear her.

She doesn't have to say when.

The night Derek caught them.

The unfairness stings.

"Addison. You _asked _me to leave."

She doesn't say anything.

He moves her so he can see her face – she's rag doll limp and puts up no protest but she doesn't meet his eyes.

"I came back," he reminds her. "You asked me to come back, and I came back."

When she's still silent, he shakes his head. "Is there something I'm supposed to be doing here that I'm not doing? Tell me. You're here every night but you won't stay."

She shrugs.

"Because I left? When you asked me to? Addison, come on."

Nothing.

She's still quiet when he takes her face in his hands, sees the emptiness in her eyes, feels her pulse against his palms – kisses her deeply enough that she couldn't talk even if she wanted to.

...

She doesn't come over that night.

Or the next.

He takes a blonde resident into an on-call room. Her hair is fake too, he finds out shortly after that, but it doesn't feel as … _wrong_ as Addison's does.

* * *

_May_

* * *

Pink crocuses are forcing their heads through the clumped soil outside the brownstone, demanding notice.

He hasn't spoken to her in almost a week.

She opens the door at his heavy knock, with wet hair and reddened eyes, and he tastes guilt along with his shame. She's always seen more than he did.

"What do you want?" she asks hoarsely.

"I want to see you," he says.

Not _talk to you_ and it seems to work because she lets him in.

To the house, anyway.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"There's nothing to apologize for." She's moving papers around on the library table, fast angry movements like he's seen her after so many semi-public arguments with Derek. Washing dishes, sorting laundry, stacking books. She's a tactile person: her anger requires surfaces to skim and order, always order. "You don't owe me anything, Mark."

He leans against the wall, just looking at her. "I asked you to move in."

"Oh. That's what you thought you were doing?" She laughs a little, mirthlessly. "Yeah, I know you haven't had a lot of relationships, Mark, but offering to let me crash at your place after you finish screwing me isn't actually _asking me to move in._"

He lets the words land and sting, like they're supposed to.

"What about your relationship, Addison?" he asks. He nods toward the portable phone in its cradle. "You call Derek yet tonight?"

She doesn't answer and he doesn't back down; he chooses his battles for the most part but this one seems to have chosen him.

"He's still my husband," she says finally, not looking at him, twisting the rings around her finger.

"Did he pick up?" Mark asks, even if he knows the answer. "Did he answer?"

"You know he didn't."

"Some husband," that's all he says, and he lets the heavy front door close hard behind him.

The front desk buzzes him close to midnight, _I have Addison here for you_, and then she's framed in his doorway full of teary apologies that embarrass him.

"Forget it," he says, "it doesn't matter," and he takes one of her chilled hands in his. It's May but it's early; she's Addison and she's always cold.

She hugs him tightly around the waist, pressing her head against his chest, and he runs his fingers through her hair. He's getting used to the blonde.

"I don't – I don't want him back," she says, a little muffled by his shirt. "That's not what it is. I just want him to answer. He hasn't picked up, though. Not once."

_Am I invisible?_

He makes her a drink but she's already asleep by the time he brings it to the couch. He watches her breathing for a moment, her head tipped back against the cushions and her lips parted. Then he lifts her without waking her and carries her to his bed. She stirs when he sets her down and he cups a cheek warm from slumber, smiles down at her. "It's okay. Go back to sleep."

When he strips to boxers to join her she wakes up even more, full of teary apologies now that he bats away but he lets her crawl all over him with whispers that sound like seawater. _I wouldn't_, she says, _I didn't_, that kind of thing, and the words are as salt-tinged as her tears.

...

He doesn't see her at all the next day.

...

He starts avoiding the faculty practice if he can help it. There's something disconcerting about catching a glimpse of her blonde head when he doesn't expect it.

"Was it just sex, for you?" she asks the next time she comes over, and it's so unfair that he isn't even sure how to respond.

"I'm the one who wanted you to move in with me," he reminds her.

"_You_ … wanted me to take a post-coital nap." She rolls her eyes. "So maybe we could have a quickie in the morning. That's what you wanted."

He lets her finish lashing out before he responds.

"What exactly do you want from me, Addison? You want me to say I don't want the sex? That's not true. You want to pretend that's all I want, make yourself feel better because you're the one who doesn't want more? Fine."

She just breathes in and out for a minute after he says it, no response. He watches her chest rise and fall.

"I do want more," she says softly.

"Then take more." He hears the intensity of his tone, too close to desperation. "It's here, Addison. Take it."

...

She's looking out the wall of windows running the west side of his apartment, toward the water.

"I didn't hear you get up," he says.

"I didn't want to wake you."

He rests his hands on the shoulders of her silk robe. Inches from the top of her head, he can see the hint of red roots at her scalp, giving away the fake blonde.

"I can't do this," she says to the window. "I can't do it anymore."

Fine.

That's what he says: _fine._

She dresses fast, alone, but when they're both ready for work she pushes him against the door of his apartment so she couldn't have opened it anyway. He lets her. He lifts her. She digs her fingernails into his back and she has tears in her eyes when he sets her back on her feet. He watches her tug her clothes back into place, smooth the hank of hair at the back that's ridged from his grip.

"I'm sorry," she says.

Yeah. He's sorry too.

...

Nancy shows up at his private office, where he's taken to spending every afternoon when he's not in the OR.

"I'm just making sure you're alive," she says in that bossy big-sister voice of hers. "I'm not picking sides."

What are the sides? No, really, he doesn't know. Lately he and Addison are on opposite ones, so if there are only two, where the hell is Derek?

He wonders if Addison spoke with her.

"It was stupid," Nancy says. "Even for you, Mark."

"It was two months ago."

"It's still stupid." She sits down on one of his visitor chairs without an invitation and crosses her legs. And catches him looking.

Derek still doesn't know about that summer Nancy was home from college. He was just shy of seventeen. That was May too, come to think of it.

"Mark." She leans forward. "I know you. You're … you. It was a mistake, it's out of your system."

She has no idea.

"Right?" She raises an eyebrow.

"Right," he says.

_Wrong._

"Have you seen Addie?' Nancy asks.

"Not for a while."

That's true, actually.

"Well, I've spoken with her." Nancy sounds bossy again. "And she's having a very hard time with all of this, Mark, and I hope you thought about that before you – did whatever you did."

He just sits there and let her talk at him, like she has any idea what kind of a _very hard time_ Addison has had, like Mark wasn't the one stuck watching that marriage come apart at the seams.

He waits until she's standing up to go, smoothing her skirt, before he asks:

"Have you spoken to Derek?"

Nancy just looks at him for a long moment. There's something like pity in her dark eyes.

...

"Nancy called me."

"Yeah?" He looks up from his desk.

"She said she saw you." Addison props her hips, looking down at him. "That she went to your office. You didn't tell me."

He shrugs.

"And, uh, you didn't tell her." She drops her eyes. "About us, I mean."

She sounds – surprised?

"It's none of her business."

Addison raises an eyebrow. "Nancy thinks everything is her business."

"Let her," Mark says simply.

She hovers in his office, though. "I haven't seen you, really," she says softly. "Have you been – how have you been?"

"How do you think I've been?"

Addison blinks.

"So you've been avoiding me?" Her voice rises a little.

"You're the one who didn't want to … stay," he says, instead of _move in._

"I know." She looks down at her hands, fussing with the catch on her bracelet, before she looks up again. "I'm here now," she says.

"Yeah, you are." Mark lets his gaze slide down her body, forgets the hollow in the pit of his stomach. "So what do you say we lock that door," he points to it, "and get reacquainted? You know, since it's just about the sex."

Her cheeks flush. "Mark, that's not fair."

It's not. He agrees. To either of them.

He watches her walk across his office, reach for the doorknob, but she doesn't leave. She turns around and walks back to him, she holds onto his face with both her hands until he's forced to look at her and see she looks as miserable as he feels.

...

She slides in next to him at Grand Rounds with an extra cappuccino, like she's an intern trying to curry favor.

The diamonds on her left hand catch the light.

He drinks the cappuccino but he doesn't meet her eyes.

* * *

_June_

* * *

June is a standout month in a hospital, demarcated by the end of the public school year three quarters of the way through. There's more head trauma in the pit, more plastics consults for facial damage from the kinds of falls that make up late June: stoops, jungle gyms, the tops of slides. Kids are home all day now, parents are adjusting, and things fall through the cracks.

But early June is just warm, soft and fragrant, and so is she when the doorman buzzes her up: _I have Addison here for you._

"It's not just about the sex," she says.

That's it.

That's her opening line.

"Yeah?" He ambles over to her without the speed his muscles are screaming for. He's missed her. "But a couple weeks without it and you're back."

A _couple weeks_ isn't right. It's been eleven days; the calendar supports this. She could accuse him of exaggerating.

She blinks. "I wanted to let you know I'm coloring my hair tomorrow," she says. "I'm sick of the blonde."

Oh. He takes that in.

"So if you want to have sex with blonde me one last time, this is your chance." She says it seductively, or she's trying to, but her voice isn't quite there.

Maybe it's the phrase _one last time._

He covers the space between them and feels her inhale at his closeness. Very slowly, without touching her, he inclines his head toward hers. He feels her inhale, sees the rise in the flushed skin of her chest. He doesn't have to look up to see her dilated pupils; she's Addison. She's an open book he's read before but she's the one who closed herself off.

A millimeter from her trembling lips, he pulls back, smirking at her expression.

"Mark." She shakes her head. "Stop playing games."

He doesn't.

He makes her wait – she's aroused to the point of impatience by the time he finally peels off her clothes.

He turns her around and winds a handful of blonde hair around his fist, exposing the vulnerable back of her neck. Laughs a little, to himself, at anyone who thinks this position is _impersonal._ She doesn't, or at least it's personal enough for her to call his name; he summons all his vestiges of control to keep going until she's lost any semblance of hers. She's sprawled exhausted on her belly on damp sheets; he turns her over and buries his face between her thighs until she's keening underneath him. She's gasping for breath by the time he's finished. He sits up a little on the bed, lets her collapse against his chest so their sweat mingles. Her damp tangled hair catches on his fingers; he soothes her with his palms on her bare skin. Finally, when her breathing settle, he speaks.

"You missed me," he says.

"Shut up," she says, but he can feel her smiling.

...

He knocks on the door of the brownstone for the first time since he confronted her about Derek. Knock first, buzzer second. She's usually within earshot anyway.

"Mark … ." He ignores the fact that she's wearing one of Derek's old shirts.

"Move in with me," he says.

She walks over to him, reaches up, links her arms around his neck. "Why?" she asks, and it has the sound of a test.

"Because I want to live with you."

He slides his hands down to cup her possessively and drag her body against his; she whimpers a little, making it all too clear she wants it too. He moves his hips against hers a few times until her body tightens against his with desire and then he moves back, pushing her very gently away by the hips.

"Mark?" Her eyes are confused in her flushed face.

"Let's wait," he says.

"Why?"

He almost laughs at how outraged she sounds.

"It's not just about the sex," he reminds her.

"I know, but … ." She stops talking. "You're not going to sleep with me unless I move in with you?"

"I didn't say that."

She's scowling, her brow furrowed, at odds with the way her chest is still rising and falling with rapid breaths and her eyes are still smoky.

He takes pity on her, turns her around and pulls her against him; they sink down on the stairs and he uses just his fingers, quickly, to make his point. She sags against him with relief and he laughs a little, kissing the side of her head.

"Better?"

She turns around in his lap so she can straddle him, resting her hands on his shoulders. "I'm better," she says. "I'm always better when you're here," and fuck if his throat doesn't thicken up at her words.

He lets her kiss him for distraction, pulls her shirt over her head and helps himself to the soft flesh underneath, lets her slide a couple steps down and return the favor while he pulls his fingers through her long hair.

She's resting her head against his thigh, breathing audibly, when he speaks.

"I was just wondering," he says.

"What?"

"If Derek took his key."

She looks up at him, her face flushed. "Mark … I don't want to think about him right now."

"Sorry." He kisses one of her bare shoulders.

She pushes herself up off the steps and he thinks he's about to get kicked out or worse but she turns and holds a hand out to him.

"Let's get out of here," she says.


	3. Summer

**SUMMER**

* * *

_July_

* * *

The thermostat outside climbs – which, okay, he hasn't seen a thermostat like that since the one outside Carolyn Shepherd's kitchen window, but the temperature at the bottom of the screen on NY1 climbs anyway. That perky little weather girl with the dark eyes and short skirts, she feels it too: _it's getting hot out there._

In here, it's air conditioned, but Addison is always fussing with the temperature gauge, complaining that he sets it too cold.

Her things are everywhere: she packed a bigger bag this time. Little bottles and scraps of silky fabric. Bits and pieces that smell of her.

In a tepid shower, in the morning, he digs his fingers into her hair, massaging her scalp. The blonde is gone, she's back to red, but there's something underneath, some coarseness to the texture and lightening of a few strands that threaten to disturb the peace like a lurking summer storm. _Age_, that's what that means. He's made a career out of halting that process; it's the halting that feels natural to him, not the aging. Not that he could ever tell her this.

She just turns around in his arms, smiles against his lips. But her hand at the back of his neck is her left. He takes it down, looks at it.

"Mark …"

She has to move at her own pace. That's what she told him. She puts him through his paces all the time but he has to hang back if he wants her beside him, so … fine. But he takes her hand down when she holds it to his cheek.

"Mark."

All she says is his name, again, but she has a hundred ways to say it and this one is laced with hurt.

"I'm going to be late for work," he says.

...

He lets her see him talking to one of the new interns. _Mentoring_, that's what he's doing. He's not crazy about faculty practice but he has no problem with a new crop of doctors every year. No problem at all.

She's laughing a little, he didn't catch her name, but he catches Addison looking.

...

"I was married for eleven years," that's what she says that night, her voice shaking a little.

Not _I've been married_, but _I was married._ He may not remember much from the sentences Sister Rosalyn made them diagram but he knows the perfect when he hears it.

Complete.

Finished.

"So it's over?"

He pours himself a shot. It would be something to drink to, if it were true.

"I don't even know where he is." She takes a long sip of wine from one of his glasses. "I asked Nancy, but you know her, and … yeah." She pauses. Looks at him. "How can you be married to someone if you don't know where they are?"

There are a lot of things he could say to that.

Like Derek left long before the night he caught them together.

But her lower lip is trembling and it's a little dark from the wine, so he doesn't say anything. Just kisses her, wondering how she can taste the same as that first time and so different, all at once.

...

She brews his coffee in the morning and pours it into a mug for him and props her hips on his kitchen island while he drinks, eyes heavy-lidded, and he can look into them and remember what he did to her last night and it's so domestic and so … dirty, all at once, that he has to have her again right then and there.

So this is _living together_ and he definitely sees the appeal, except that the diamond on her hand catches the light when they walk out into the heat for work, still a little breathless.

He stays at work longer than he needs. He's not alone.

She's awake when he gets home that night, drinking wine in his living room, and if she notices he smells of another woman's perfume she doesn't say anything. Her back is already turned when he crawls into bed behind her; he counts the knobs on her spine instead of sheep.

Her hair is everywhere on the pillows, red again but not the same, still unfamiliar, and he hates himself.

_At least that's familiar._

...

His reflection in the mirror hates him right back.

At the gym, he can't avoid his own face.

He looks the same.

Everything is different, but he still looks the same.

There's a new personal trainer helping some I-banker idiot on the adductor and Mark glances at her. Takes in the bossy way she's directing him, her swinging ponytail. She reminds him of someone. There's body hugging spandex and that's not exactly a deterrent, but it's what she's not wearing that makes her even more appealing. He watches her left hand where it rests on the machine.

Naked.

So are they, now, in the little dressing room that says _Staff Only _in self-important plasticky plaque letters.

"We're not supposed to bring members in here," she whispers, laughing into his neck when he responds by sweeping some folded-up towels off a jutting shelf and lifting her up to take their place.

"You're a rule-follower, huh?" He raises his eyebrows.

"Depends on the rule." Her eyes are heavy-lidded with lust and they're heavy-lidded, plain and simple, and they're _hers_.

Not some stranger personal trainer dime a dozen blonde, not anymore.

Her.

What would her left hand look like, bare?

...

Addison apologizes to him again at work – _it's habit, that's all, I don't want people to talk, it doesn't mean anything, really, Mark, _surprising him in his office and disappearing under his desk while his eyebrows practically meet his hairline.

"I always wanted to do that," she says afterwards.

...

He gets home late again. She's waiting for him.

"Maybe I should go back to the brownstone," she says.

"Maybe you should."

His bicycle is still in the basement.

That's the problem: there's no place they can go where the rest of them aren't.

Derek is everywhere in his apartment too. He can't get rid of him.

Addison doesn't go back to the brownstone.

But Derek is somehow still all over her and that night when Mark pins her arms over her head and marks her with a frenzied pace while she urges him on, he can't escape it. She was Derek's first.

She's exhausted afterwards, lying spent on her side, and he picks up her left hand and slides the rings off. Just like that.

"Mark … ." She sounds uneasy.

"They're just rings," he says.

He knows they're not, and he lets her take them back.

...

In a call room that smells of bleach and coffee he lets himself hate her, just a little; he presses a resident who's been eyeing him for a while against the locked door and she looks up at him with serious dark eyes and says, _I thought maybe you and Addison Shepherd … _

"Addison who?" he asks, in a growl, he knows she'll like it and she does. She's young and flexible and she's game and it's just about the sex, sure, but who says he's good for anything else?

...

"Remember the blackout?" she asks. Her voice is soft with reminiscence.

Why does she want to do this?

Remember all those times, those other days and months and summers, when she was Derek's?

So he doesn't answer. He doesn't need to, anyway. The whole goddamn city remembers that blackout. He walked fifty blocks in slowly darkening summer evening, eating a half-melted Klondike bar some bodega owner was tossing to passersby and figuring the longer than usual walk would burn off the unnecessary sugar. Actually, it wasn't a Klondike bar. It was some – off-brand thing that tasted like the freezer that failed it but it also tasted of his childhood summers, generic supermarket ice cream at the Shepherds' house dripping sticky down his arm, bleached grass under bare feet. Even then, his memories were all tangled up with Derek's. His life too.

"You came over," she prompts.

"Yeah. I remember."

She turns to him, props up on an elbow. Her cheeks are shiny: she's wearing moisturizer to bed. She's wearing her reading glasses. There's a folded up medical journal on the nightstand.

It's so … domestic. Except the rings on her finger aren't his.

She sees him looking. And then he's looking at her lips. His name starts differently from Derek's. When you look at women's mouths as much as he does – well. She has to press her lips together to say his name. He likes this; it means when they're alone, when he's touching her and she's arching under him and pressing her lips together, it's like she's saying his name. Every time. _Mm_. _Mark. _ But this is different now, as he sees it start to happen. He interrupts her with his own mouth, before she can speak. She tastes faintly of mint – like toothpaste, but not terribly recent … she's been in bed a while. Maybe waiting for him.

She seems a little surprised, but she doesn't object. She reaches for her glasses, and he stops her.

"Keep them on."

She smiles at this. "You have a librarian thing, huh?"

"I have a _you_ thing." He says it in a growl, like it's a line, a pick up line. A game.

She laughs a little, pleased.

The problem: it isn't a game.

...

"Richard Webber called."

"Yeah?" He pours a glass of whatever she's been drinking. It's red and gets the job done, that's all he needs to know. His muscles are tense from a long procedure, his body worn in that specific rainy way where everything is harder. A humid wheeze.

"Derek's in Seattle."

Mark turns this over in his mind. Derek, in Seattle? He's never been. _He _could be either of them. They drove across the country once, in college, for reasons that don't matter anymore now except that they had a list of the states – not a map, a list, that Amy put together. It was alphabetical, and they teased her because the country isn't alphabetical. "I reorganized it," she said, and she was so serious about that, at eleven, that they couldn't exactly refuse. So they ticked off each state as they crossed its border. They never touched Washington.

"Why Seattle?"

"Richard's in Seattle," Addison says, in that frustratingly circular way she'll speak sometimes. It's half _Abbot and Costello_ and half Mark feeling like he's on the wrong stage and somehow forgot his lines. Like she wants him to say something, but won't say what it is.

"Okay." He drains the glass. "I'm going to take a shower."

"Mark – "

"You coming?" He asks it over his shoulder.

She is.

First she's coming to join him under the pounding hot water and then she's coming apart in his arms. He's not doing it on purpose. He's not trying to drive the last thoughts of Derek and Seattle out of her head, but he's driving her into the slick marble wall of the shower in the rental he's never even liked. She's gasping into his mouth but she gives way and neither of them speaks until she's shaking, both of her impossibly long legs still wrapped around him. He pushes some of her wet hair off her face to see her eyes, which are heavy-lidded and half closed.

"You okay?" he asks.

"I'm okay. Are _you _okay?" She arches her brow like she's teasing him.

She'll only give in when he's screwing her.

That's when she gives in.

Just like she'll take off all her clothes, sleep without a stitch of them … but she still hasn't let him see her naked.

Not really. Not in the way it counts.

...

She doesn't ask him where he was the night before, when she gets home. Her silence sounds like a question so his answer is a wordless kiss, the press of his body against hers.

"Mark … ."

He lifts her onto the island; it's the perfect height for her to grip him with her legs.

"I should shower first," she says. "It was so hot out today."

He doesn't respond, just slides his hands under her tight-fitting skirt, pushing it up in one swift motion. She gasps a little when her bare thighs make contact with the cold marble of the island.

"Mark …. ."

He quiets her with a kiss. Long and slow – she tastes like wine – and he captures her lower lip with his as she starts to lean back, pulling her in again.

"Yes?" he asks, keeping his tone innocent.

"Nothing."

"Yeah, I didn't think so." He smiles at her husky-voiced reply and she closes her eyes as he slips an arm behind her to support her, his other hand quelling any remaining protest.

When she's shuddered against him, once and then a second time, more violently than the first, he pushes her back on the island, careful to support her so her head doesn't strike its surface. She gets what he wants right away, propping herself up and looking at him through heavy lowered lids as he exhales the sheer relief of her tight grip on him.

She's pulling on him, urging him to go faster. But it feels dangerous on the slippery island, her back arched, weight behind her on her elbows, one long leg thrown over his shoulder.

Her fingernails mark his shoulders, his back, gasping in his ear when she's finished; it's dangerous but they survive.

* * *

_August_

* * *

He walks home on sweating streets, strips off his damp shirt before the apartment door is even closed. The air conditioning is on full blast, the way he likes it. What's a little money on electricity when it comes to living in an ice box?

He showers before he does anything, before he opens the refrigerator, towel around his waist, to choose between beer and water.

Inside the bedroom, it's a little warm – Addison has figured out the thermostat – but gooseflesh rises anyway on his still-damp skin.

She's lying half on her side, asleep, lips parted, red hair spread out everywhere. Taking up space.

Maybe marking her territory.

He slides into bed beside her. She's sleeping heavily, doesn't wake up until he runs his hands over her warm skin, tracing the dip of her side. She's wearing nothing except a pair of panties – lace, he learns with his fingers as she stirs awake.

"Cold," she mumbles sleepily, but she doesn't push him away.

He draws her close, rearranges her on his chest so he can fill his palms with her softness, kiss the tender skin at her neck. She lets him,

"Where were you tonight?" she asks as he explores the lace he barely grazed before.

"Working," he says.

He rolls them both over when she doesn't reply. Poised over her, he studies her face. The bedroom is dark; he can still see everything.

She's soft and willing but not particularly active. Silent, mostly, breasts rising and falling with her low breaths, but she hisses uncomfortably when he takes one of them in his mouth.

He draws back. "Did I hurt you?"

"I'm just a little tender," she says.

He backs off, focuses on other areas instead, enjoys the warmth of her until no part of him is cold. He's half asleep himself before he realizes she didn't answer his question.

That, or he asked the wrong one.

...

He comes home to an unopened bottle of wine. She's sitting on one of the stools at his kitchen island, eyes red rimmed, tracing an unenthusiastic circle around the rim of an empty glass. She always has to be touching something. He used to look at those hands and imagine what they'd be like wrapped around his – but like most things in his adult life, it's a disappointment.

Not Addison. She's not a disappointment.

This, though? Half of her, what's left of her after Derek finished with her, the husk of _AddisonAndDerek? _The rings and the empty eyes? He didn't sign on for that.

He's not just a … what was it she used to call him, a manwhore? Not such a manwhore that he totally lacks self-awareness. He's had a bit of therapy. And he's well aware that he's probably not meetings her typically high expectations either. He's aware that if he saw her like this six months ago, three months ago even, with red rimmed eyes a crumpled tissue, obviously upset, he would have reacted differently.

He would have hugged her, dried her tears, asked her what was wrong. Promised her it would get better, whatever it was: complications at work. Complications at home. Derek.

Usually, it was Derek. More toward the end, assuming there was an end.

"Mark," she says hoarsely.

"If this is about Derek, I don't want to hear it."

He hears his own voice instead, careless even though –

And he hates to admit this, he really does –

He cares.

But the hand playing with the label of the wine bottle now is her left – no wonder her surgical dexterity is legendary, she can't stop it with those fingers, always in motion, and the sparkling rings capture the lights on the ceiling.

"It's not about Derek." Her voice is small and hurt.

He takes his time anyway, even though she's dying for him to ask what's wrong. And he knows it, and he doesn't ask anyway. He's no better than Derek. Or he's worse because he's not indifferent. He's not absent. He's here, and he's refusing her anyway.

He opens the wine himself, slow hands on the corkscrew because he knows she's watching, knows from things she's told him that he wasn't the only one who used to watch, who used to think about … hands.

He drinks half the glass – it's too big a red for him this time of night. It tastes thick and metallic.

Finally he sits down next to her. She turns an expectant face to his and her eyes are shimmering with tears. The blue is turning green like it does when she cries – he has no idea why, he probably should have paid more attention during his ophtho rotation, but he knew wasn't interested and he's never had much time for things that don't interest him.

He picks up her left hand instead of speaking.

"Not this again," she says.

He's not looking at her; he's looking at her hand.

When she tries to pull it out of his grasp he holds on a couple seconds longer than he needs to. It was meant to disarm her and he can see from the look in her eyes that it did. He'll feel guilty about it later.

"You may get your wish after all," she says, her voice low and a little shaky.

"Yeah? What wish is that?" He drinks some more wine.

"The rings." Now she's studying her own hand. "I'll have to – I won't be able to wear them."

That'll be the day.

"Mark – "

"Leave them, Addison. You want to wear his rings, wear his rings." He studies her face, wondering if she can see in _his_ face what he was doing earlier today, when she was in surgery and he was in an on-call room making someone who wasn't her pay for how frustrated she left him this morning.

Not that the girl – what's her name, Lucy? He thinks? A resident. Not that she was complaining.

Far from it.

"Mark, would you just listen to me?"

"All I do is listen to you," he says.

It's not true.

It's not nice.

It's something she would have told him, months ago, Derek said to her, and she'd cry when she told him, and he would have held her and told her she deserved better and _meant_ it.

That's the trouble with meaning it: you always mean things, until you don't.

"Mark, would you just – I have to tell you something."

"So tell me."

" … I'm pregnant." She looks up at him and the tears are threatening to spill over now. "I'm pregnant," she says again, and then she drops her head into her hand like just saying the words exhausted her.

"You're – you're what?" he repeats numbly, stupidly.

Pregnant?

That can't be right.

"I'm sorry," she says miserably.

"Sorry?" His heart is speeding up. "Addison, why – why would you be sorry?"

She doesn't answer.

Addison, pregnant.

_Pregnant._

Tentatively, he reaches a hand across the island, touching her face where it rests in her hand. She looks up after a moment of contact, and gives him a sad quarter of a smile. He pushes some hair behind her ear. "Don't be sorry," he says quietly.

"I've messed everything up."

"Not everything." He cups her cheek; her face fits so perfectly into his palm. "Birth control, yes, but not everything."

She looks like she's going to crack a smile, and then her mouth trembles. "Everything," she says. "With you, with …"

She stops talking, but he hears it anyway: _with Derek. _

"Hey."

She looks up at him.

"It's okay," he tells her, like he used to. "It's going to be okay."

"You think?"

"I think." He breaks contact for only as long as it takes to shift into the stool next to hers, and then he pulls her into his arms. She comes willingly – yielding physically has never been her problem, that's not what she withholds from him and they both know it.

He absorbs her tears for a while and when she draws back she laughs a little, self-deprecating, _I'm a mess_, that's what she says.

He's the one who's a mess.

A baby.

Jesus.

There's no turning back now.

And that shouldn't feel like victory but she sleeps in his arms and when those damned rings scratch him in half-sleep he reminds himself that she's carrying _his_ child.

It's not a tug-of-war and she's not a prize to be won but he never wins, so he'll take it.

...

_Pregnant. _

The word blurs his vision that night, when he traces his hands lightly over her body. His baby. Inside her.

He thinks, a little sick with guilt, that he's finally marked her in a way Derek never did.

He thinks he wants this baby, this woman, and he feels even sicker about that because god, living together is – one thing.

A baby, though.

A baby is real.

She fits her body into his to sleep and he flattened his palm against her stomach even though there's nothing to feel. Nothing to see either, but it's there.

She can't go back to the brownstone now.

More guilt … but then he sleeps.

...

She's grey and tired the next morning, drinks half a cup of coffee and catches him watching the level of liquid in the cup.

"Worried?" she asks.

Worried?

He should be fucking terrified.

But that's not what she means.

So he just says _no, I trust you_, and that's not quite right either.

He trusts her about fetal development.

Sure.

He trusted her with his heart, once. He never meant to. He wasn't even supposed to have one.

They were both wrong, maybe.

...

He's bursting with this secret, though.

It's a hot and sticky morning and his shirt clings to his back and his heart thuds his ribcage when he forgoes the stinking subway stairs for another twenty blocks of humid non-breeze.

He has part of the afternoon off and he makes it down the subway stairs this time. He ends up in Chinatown and has a wordless exchange with a wizened old man and then he's holding a little blue and white onesie and then after that he's holding the killer dumplings from the place he's been going since med school, when he met that girl in Ethics who –

But that's over now.

Everything is different now.

He buys a calendar. _Scenes From New York City_, that's what it says. Like a tourist … which is fitting, actually. He's felt like a visitor for most of his life.

...

He touches her with excruciating care around her tender skin. She laughs a little, teary:

_Mark, I won't break. _

_Mark, it's still me._

Between his hands her face is soft, pensive.

She wants more, urges him to go faster, drive deeper, but he braces himself to slow them both down, taking his time.

_I'm not fragile,_ she tells him gently, stroking the sides of his face. _I'm still me._

It occurs to him that those two sentences contradict each other, in a way, but he keeps his mouth shut.

...

"How are you feeling?"

"Tired," she admits, looking up from the journal she's reading, long legs stretched out on his couch. "I don't know if it's – you know, the pregnancy," and she blushes a little when she says it – "or just … everything."

Yeah, he gets that.

"What are you holding – oh, Mark."

_It's so tiny_, she says softly, unfolding the onesie.

She looks at it for a long moment, presses it briefly to her cheek and his throat feels thick until he clears it.

"We gotta train her early, you know."

"Oh, you think it's a her?" Her eyes are shining with tears.

"As long as it's a Yankee fan I don't care what it is." He smiles at her and she cries, a little. He hugs her and shows her the calendar. It feels important that she know.

He encourages her to flip the pages until she sees it: the little red circle on the due date.

She inhales sharply.

"I counted LMP for the due date," he says. "March. The nineteenth. Was I right?"

"You were right."

She holds him hard, around the neck, her face obscured. "I'm scared," she admits, into his neck.

"Me too." He kisses the side of her head.

It's not an admission for him. The real admission, the one he can't make out loud: he should be _more_ scared than he is. A hell of a lot more.

She's pregnant with his fucking kid and he knows she's terrified and … unconscious smiles are tugging at his mouth at the oddest of times, including this one. She can't see his face when he holds her like this, though. At least there's that.

...

She turns guiltily from the window when he unlocks the door, her phone in her hand.

"It's not what you think," she says.

Isn't that supposed to be his line?

He just lets her keep talking.

"I need to, um, I'm going to talk to a lawyer."

Okay. That was unexpected.

"Yeah." She laughs a little, though her eyes are teary. "How, um, how was your day?" she asks.

He doesn't respond, just follows the line of her fitted dress – she's still in work clothes, though her shoes are off. So she feels small when he joins her at the window, pulls her against him. She hisses very slightly – she's tender, and he apologizes even as a mean little part of him cheers, _it's still true, you're pregnant, it's my baby. _

_Our baby._

Both of theirs.

_I love you_, she says when he moves inside her that night and his muscles tighten with guilt because he doesn't deserve this.

He says, _I love you too_, and the worst part of it all is that he means it.

He actually fucking does.

...

She comes back from the lawyers' office with manila folders of documents she doesn't show him. She says words like _mediator _and _separation._

"So you're doing this," he says.

"I have to review them. I'll review them, and I'll mail them."

"Addison."

"No, it's fine. It really is."

She's flushed from the heat outside. The heat needs to break already.

They need a break.

He needs a cold shower, or at least a lukewarm one. She takes one and he follows her and they stand under the pounding water that lets him pretend the moisture on her face isn't tears.

...

"He hasn't filed," she says. She's standing at the marble counter in his bathroom, a toothbrush in her hand, in silk pajamas he's planning to take off her as soon as she finishes washing up.

"Hm?"

"Derek. He hasn't filed." She turns to look up at him, small in bare feet.

"I know that."

"I just wonder why."

"Why?" he repeats.

Why knows why Derek does anything?

"Does it matter?" he asks.

"No, of course not," she says quickly. She turns back to the sink but the mirror in front of her won't let her hide her face. The lie is telegraphed in her eyes and nothing, not even the feel of her while he finally pulls off those stupid pajamas and uses everything he has to make her forget her husband's name, can change that.

_That was incredible_, she says afterwards, collapsed naked across his sheets and he agrees.

Incredible … in the sense of unbelievable.

He doesn't believe her.

He can tell she's sorry that she brought up Derek.

He's sorry too.

...

She cries the next night.

He asks: _did you make an appointment yet? So we can hear the heartbeat? _

He thinks: _you can't pace yourself out of this one. _

She says, _don't worry about it, Mark_. She says, _it's my specialty, Mark_. She says, _everything's fine, Mark._

Only part of that is a lie, at least, but they sound the same leaving her pretty mouth and that scares him. Maybe not as much as it should.

...

For the first time, he brings someone home.

"You live alone?" she asks doubtfully. Addison's feminine frippery is everywhere but he ignores it.

"I live alone," he says.

She looks like she can't tell if he's lying. That's fine; neither can he.

...

"I made an appointment," Addison tells him quietly. She's wearing her reading glasses, her hair loose around her face. Is she going to stop coloring it now that she's pregnant? He hasn't asked.

"So we can hear the heartbeat," he prompts.

Slowly, she nods.

"Addison." He sits down on the bed next to her. "Did you mail those divorce papers yet?"

...

Salmon-pink scrubs.

Peds nurses wear salmon-pink scrubs and he tells himself that's why it's Charlene and not one of the others. He brings her back to the apartment. She doesn't ask him if he lives alone.

Maybe she doesn't care.

He barely sees what's underneath the scrubs. She's willing and she's attractive enough but his hearth is thumping more with anger than arousal.

Those fucking divorce papers. _It's hard to focus on fucking when you won't mail those divorce papers. _He'd almost laugh but it's too depressing to be funny. He can fuck whoever he wants in this bed and he'll still see Addison: that's the real tragedy.

Except then he sees her, for real.

Addison is standing in the bedroom doorway, her oversized bag in one hand, looking somehow both surprised and totally resigned.

And it's worse.

...

"It's you, Addison," he reminds her, low and urgent; it's too important to yell. Charlene is long gone, an armful of hastily-grabbed scrubs, a fountain of apologies they both ignored. _No, you're not, _that's what Addison said when he tried to tell her he was sorry so now he's stopped.

"It's you," he repeats instead, the opposite of an apology. "I've been waiting for you, all this time. To take off his fucking rings, to get over him – "

"No." She shakes her head, damp tendrils of hair moving around her flushed cheeks. It's another humid scorcher out there and her blouse is patchy with perspiration; she smells of heat and anger.

"Addison – "

"It's me. Right, Mark? Tell yourself that. Go ahead and blame me for everything. Everything's my fault."

He pulls her back against him, holds her close when she resists and flattens his palm against the damp fabric covering her stomach. "What about her? It's not her fault."

"You don't know – " her voice cracks a little.

But he does. He knows it's a girl. He just does.

"Addison." Her name lengthens into a plea. "We both screwed up."

"I left my marriage for you," she whispers, but it tastes sour, like a lie.

Both parts of it.

_I love you_, he says, but she pushes him away.

_That's not going to work this time_, she says.

But it's not a strategy, not a game, it's something more primal than that, more painful and she has to work to wrench herself free of his grip.

"I'm leaving," she announces.

"Where are you going to go?"

And he didn't mean it like that, _doesn't _mean it like that – he was genuinely wondering – but her face sets in lines of regretful hurt and his heart squeezes closed.

_You can't go_, he says, because that's what he meant in the first place, and she shakes her head. There are tears on her cheeks.

...

"What about the appointment?"

He says it to her in the hospital hallway where she can't get away, just loud enough that she'll know not to ignore him and she glares at him, pulls on the sleeve of his white coat until they're standing in a supply closet that smells of betadine and packing tape.

"Mark – don't corner me," she says.

"You cornered me first, Addison."

For a moment they just look at each other, breathing. There's a thick rope of gold around her throat; she touches it nervously.

"It was a mistake," she says.

His heart speeds up. "What was a mistake?" he makes himself ask. "Which part?"

She just looks at him; her eyes are huge and unblinking. Some trick of the reflection from her oversized necklace, or something.

She has to blink. She's human, isn't she?

But there's something cold in her face, something that leaches into him when he tries to touch her, leaves him shivering deep enough that he's not sure he can recover.

"Addison, don't do this."

"What am I supposed to do?" she asks. She's staring down at her twisting hands now, not meeting his eyes.

"Not this. Addison, it was one time."

Neither of them acknowledges the lie.

He tries again: "Charlene isn't worth it," he says.

"She was worth it to you. Enough to screw her in – "

She stops talking.

She doesn't say _in my bed_.

Maybe he's lived alone all this time after all. Maybe that was never a lie.

"Addison – "

"No, forget it. Charlene doesn't matter, Mark. Don't you get that? _I'm_ not worth it to you, and that's the issue."

His mouth opens but no words come out. How does she figure that? How can that make sense to her?

He searches her face, the import of the moment not lost on him but he has no idea how to fix it.

"I've made mistakes," he says finally and she sniffs in response, haughty-sarcastic.

"So have I." She shakes her head. "I can't make another one."

"Addison – "

"I can't," she says. "No."

And then she finally blinks; it's disconcerting enough that he hardly notices when she walks away.

Except that the air in the room changes and he's fairly certain he's older when he finally staggers out to pretend that nothing happened.

...

_You've reached Dr. Addison Shepherd. I'm not available to take your call, but if you leave a message I'll get back to you as soon as possible._

The _Shepherd_ makes him wince every time he hears her outgoing message.

Which is a lot of times.

He leaves a lot of voicemails.

_Addison. We have to talk about this. Can we at least just talk about this?_

_Addison, you don't have to do this. Look, we can figure this out. At least give me a chance here. Give me a chance to show you I can do this._

_Addison. I know you don't listen to anyone but I deserve be part of this decision. It's my goddamn kid too. _

_Addison, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that, I just wanted to talk to you. I don't understand how everything got so screwed up._

_Addison, are you really not going to call me back?_

_Addison, you called in sick today? You never call in sick. _

_Addison. Would you just please let me know you're okay?_

_Addison, I swear to god, I'm going to find you._

_Addison, please._

_Please._

...

He's slumped on the couch with a beer, the flickering image on the screen doing little to distract him, when his doorbell buzzes.

He assumes it's the pizza he ordered – working out as much he does has lots of benefits: keeps him sane, keeps him hot, keeps him busy, and also lets him keep eating like a medical student.

And the front desk knows the delivery guys from Santos, knows Mark doesn't need a call to send them up.

It's not pizza, though, when he pulls open the door.

"They didn't call me," he says when he sees her standing there. It's still so goddamned hot out there and damp wisps of hair are sticking to her neck.

"I guess they know me," she says.

"Yeah? I wish I could say the same."

She blinks, looking hurt.

"Are you coming in?" he asks.

"Do you want me to come in?"

He takes a step back from the door. "You're already here. You might as well."

She walks slowly through his apartment like she's wading through something sticky and then she turns to him, twisting her hands. "I had to stay away, Mark."

"Oh, that's how you're going to do this? You did it all for me?"

"No, that's not what I mean, I just – you wouldn't have wanted to be there. It's ugly and – messy, and – "

He stares. He wants to cover his ears. Wants to bury his head somewhere he won't have to hear her call the end of their child's life _ugly. _And _messy. _

"You think it was easy for me?" she demands.

There are tears in her eyes.

"I think you're the only one who got a vote."

"Take it up with congress," she snaps, wiping her eyes. "It was hard for me too, Mark, even if you can't see that, and I needed you, but I didn't want you to have to see it."

"You took the pill," he says slowly, realizing. "You went with the medical."

"I wanted privacy." She looks down at her hands.

He's nauseated, thinking of her bent double in the oversized marble bathroom off the master in the brownstone, expelling the remains of their mistake.

"You were alone?"

"Of course I was alone." She looks up at him and shakes her head. "Nobody knows, Mark. Nobody except you."

"You prescribed it yourself," he says slowly, realizing.

"I didn't want a trail."

"Jesus, Addison."

"Are you going to report me?" She turns her stubborn, tearful face up to his. "I already threw my marriage away, Mark. I already threw my life away."

"So you're going to throw your career away too?" He shakes his head. "Why the hell do you have to make this so hard?"

"I didn't _make_ anything hard. It's hard. It just is."

"Fine. It's hard." He looks at her for a minute. She's pale, the flush from outside's heat already gone from her face. "Are you okay?" he asks gruffly.

"What, like from the … termination, you mean?"

He winces, but nods.

"I'm okay." She holds his gaze. "Ask me again."

"Ask you what?"

"Ask me if I'm okay," she repeats patiently.

"Are you okay?" he asks, on cue, a little confused.

"No." She draws a shaky breath. "I'm not okay. I don't know which side is up anymore, I don't know who I am anymore, and I'm sorry I hurt you but I just – I couldn't bring an innocent child into this. I just couldn't."

"Our lives are so bad?" He tries to sound like he's joking, like it's not tearing him apart. "You'd rather kill a kid than let it live with us?"

"Don't you dare." She whirls on him, her eyes blazing. "_Kill_ a – god, Mark, are you a doctor or not?"

"Not now," he says grimly. "Not today, I'm not."

"Mark, please." Her eyes are imploring but all he can see is her face when she unfolded that stupid fucking onesie.

"What do you want from me, Addison?"

She blinks. "You sound like Derek."

"But not enough like Derek, right? Or you'd want to stay? You'd want the baby and the house and the whole fucking thing – the rings – " He grabs her left hand and forces it up to her face – not hard, but he doesn't let go either. "You want Derek's baby, and Derek wants nothing to do with you, and we could have – "

"We could have what?" She pulls her hand away, taking back control. "We could have _what_, Mark?"

_We could have been a family._

He doesn't say it. He looks at her tear-streaked face and the spot on her printed blouse where he knows sweat has gathered between her breasts in the smothering heat outside. The pale hollows of her cheeks, the shadows under her eyes.

Is it supposed to make him feel better that she's miserable too?

Because it doesn't.

"Forget it," he mutters.

"Okay." She draws a deep, shaking breath. "Um. Do you, uh, do you want me to go?"

"What's in it for me if you stay?" he asks, raising his eyebrows.

He does it because he knows it will upset her.

Even if that means he's a bastard, and even if that means she's right.

She takes a step back, pain in her eyes. "_Mark._"

"What?" He spreads his hands. "I'm good for one thing, right?"

"That's not what I said."

He puts both hands on her waist and pulls her close for a moment. He brushes her lips with his. He thinks of her alone in the brownstone flushing away their shared mistake. For just a moment he rests his forehead against hers and feels her breath against his own mouth.

Her life force.

Their dead kid.

"What are you doing?" she asks shakily, after a moment.

"Nothing." He pushes her against the wall, presses his mouth to the side of her neck and leaves his mark on the flutter of her pulse while she strains against his grip.

"_Mark._"

"What?" He lets her go and she just stands there looking up at him. Her eyes are defeated. The mark he left is loud, almost vulgar against her white skin of her neck. "It's just about the sex, right?"

He steps aside and raises his eyebrows, waiting for her to move, but she doesn't. She stays pressed against the wall like he's still holding her there.

"Well?" he says. "Are you staying or going?"

She doesn't break eye contact, even though her voice shakes. "I'm staying."

He kisses her hard enough to steal her breath – she claws at his shoulders and he enjoys the flashes of pain from her fingernails. He pins her with his mouth, pressing the whole of his body against hers now. He insinuates a thigh between hers – it's practically impossible in those tight fucking skirts she likes; he has to yank it up to get access and she gasps.

He stands back for a minute and watches her trying to catch her breath, her skirt hiked up to her waist. She's wearing simple black panties and he's fucked enough women to know she didn't come here for sex.

"Go home," he says.

"I _am_ home," she whispers.

He tears her blouse open hard enough to scatter buttons and she stares at him with round, shocked eyes. Her breasts heave with the efforts of her breath, the open sides of her blouse hanging limply on either side of her rapidly moving chest. But she stays.

Her skirt is still hiked all the way up and when she reaches to pull it back down he traps both her hands.

"Mark. I can't have sex, it's too soon." He recognizes the tone she uses when she's trying to sound reasonable. But he doesn't feel reasonable and he doesn't care, he just helps himself greedily to the soft flesh exposed by her torn blouse, holding her hands on either side of her body to give him full access. She's breathing hard but not struggling. She doesn't tell him to stop. Just says his name.

"_Mark_."

He ignores her, kissing a rough trail from one clavicle to the other. He releases one of her hands so he can use one of his to tug down the lacy cups of her bra. He sucks hard on sensitive flesh while she pants underneath his mouth.

"You want me to stop?"

She doesn't say anything. Just looks at him.

He uses his teeth enough to make her hiss but she still doesn't tell him to stop. He pins her with his hips and frames her sweat-dampened face in his hands.

"This isn't your home," he says quietly, holding onto her face when she tries to pull away. "If it were your home, you'd still be pregnant."

Tears fill her eyes again. "That's not fair."

He doesn't disagree. He goes back to kissing her exposed skin, channels what it was like when he first had permission to touch her, when he was greedy for every satin inch of her. He's ignoring everything below the waist but he won't let her pull her skirt back down either.

He reaches down and slides a hand up the inside of one silky thigh and she freezes against him.

"Mark … ."

He doesn't broach the fabric barrier of her panties, just cups his hand carefully around the flesh they cover. The heat of her fills his palm.

She flinches.

"Are you in pain?" he asks quietly.

"From the abortion? No."

He releases her and she slumps against the wall in disarray. He watches, silently, as she puts herself back together, tucking her breasts back into the cups of her bra, pushing her skirt back over her hips and smoothing it down her thighs. Her blouse is missing too many buttons to close properly and she looks up at him.

"You want me to suture it?" he asks, trying to keep his tone light and not really succeeding.

"A safety pin would be fine." Her voice is cool now, her breath evened out. He finds a couple of pins from his dry cleaning and brings them to her; she's still standing in the hall. She makes no move to take them from him and he needs both hands to pin, so he sticks the rest of the pins in his mouth like a tailor. She doesn't say anything, and he carefully pins the parts of her blouse that don't button, removing the pins from his mouth as needed so that instead of buttons she has the imprint of his lips on her.

He doesn't know what to say.

He wishes he did.

But he doesn't.

"You want a drink?" he asks finally.

"I shouldn't," she says. "But … yes."

He pours her one. She sits a little stiffly on one of the stools at the island. He doesn't touch her, but he sits down too. She takes a few sips, then looks up at him.

"It's not easy for me either, Mark."

He ignores her.

"I'm still bleeding," she says in a small voice.

"Yeah?" _Join the club._

At least hers is visible, so she'll know when it's done.

His … his could go on forever.

...

The pressing humidity doesn't let up.

_August_, people murmur in the hospital halls, like it's a whole sentence in and of itself. _August, what are you going to do? _

Sweat, apparently. They're going to sweat. He rinses off in a cool shower when he's dragged himself home from work through humid streets. Afterwards, toweling dry, he leans against the door jamb and accepts a glass of wine.

"It will break soon," she says when he's halfway done drinking. "The heat," she adds.

He just nods; later, when she's sleeping half in his arms with one long bare leg flung over his, he wonders why she clarified.

...

She tastes saltier than she used to.

He doesn't share this with her. Using no words, just lips and teeth, he tracks the soft impressionable skin of her throat until her twisting hips underneath him are too much to take.

"You left marks." She's frowning at her reflection the next morning. "I told you not to leave marks."

They told each other a lot of things.

"They'll fade," he says when he sees her looking crossly at him.

"Not soon enough." She's fasting a necklace around her throat – he takes it from her and helps her with the catch while she piles her long hair on her head. It's already damp. Or still damp from her shower. It's hard to tell this in this awful muggy cycle, what's _already happened _and what's _happening too soon. _

They trek to the hospital together. Walking the last leg, stuck at that long light on Columbus, he feels sweat sticking damply to the front of his shirt. He glances over to see she's looking at him, her head tilted slightly so the whole pile of her hair – clipped up on her skull to combat the heat – goes to one side and practically tips her over.

"What?" he asks when she doesn't say anything.

"Nothing."

...

He wakes up to her sitting on the side of the bed, looking down at him. She's freshly showered, smells clean and citrusy.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she says. "I'm just looking. Is that okay?"

"Yeah." He smiles a little. "It's okay."

She rests one of her hands on his chest. It's her left.

It's bare.

She sees him looking. "It was time," she says.

And it would feel good, it should feel good, except deep down where these things fester he knows it's anything but.

"See you tonight?" he says at the door.

She stands on tiptoe a little to kiss him. "See you," she says.

All her things are gone from his apartment when he gets home.

...

"I'm sorry," she says when he calls. She picks up on the first ring and it's obvious from her voice that she's been crying.

"Where are you?" he asks even know a part of him knows.

"I'm at the airport."

He doesn't ask why; maybe he's always known. His stomach sours on the words, though.

"You're going back to him."

"I'm going to Seattle. For a week or two."

"You're going back to him," he repeats.

She pauses. "I don't know what's going to happen there."

"But you know what you want to happen."

"I don't know anything." Her breath hitches. "Mark, we screwed this up. We both did, maybe all three of us did, and I'm so sorry, but this is – "

He hangs up before she can finish the sentence, before he can figure out what _this is_.

By now, he knows her well enough to know she doesn't know either.


	4. Fall

**FALL**

* * *

_September_

* * *

The voicemail comes when he's in surgery.

_Mark, it's me, I just – I wanted to let you know I'm going to be staying out here for a while. I've taken a new position here and it's – I'm going to try for a fresh start._

Then there's a pause. Just the sound of her breathing.

_Maybe you can take this chance to, uh, to get a fresh start too. You deserve it. _Her voice shakes a little. _Um, and I'm sorry, again, that things – I'm sorry. And thank you. You know, for … just, um, just take care of yourself. Okay. Bye._

That's the whole message.

He plays it over and over again until he's memorized the spaces between her words, each inhale and _um_, each shaky exhale, each time her voice breaks. Down to the last two words.

_Okay. _

It's not okay.

_Bye. _

...

Before she left, she emptied his apartment with surgical precision, taking everything but her scent that's still clinging to her side of the bed. He watched her sleep there and made her scream there and it's empty, still smelling of her, until the maid changes the sheets and he comes home to blank white nothingness.

He brings a brunette resident back to his apartment; she doesn't technically work for him so it's fine. She's deeply tanned, nothing like Addison. Younger, brash, she whispers filthy things to him and he'll take the distraction like he'll take what she's offering, driving deeply into her over and over until they're both sweating and sated. _Stay over if you're tired_, he says, so someone else's shampoo will scent that pillow. She wakes him up with her lips wrapped around him – Jesus, they don't make residents like they used to, and he welcomes even more distraction, taking her into the shower with him until they're dirtier than they are clean.

"I guess what they say about you is true," she purrs to him when they part ways.

It's enough to get him through until the afternoon when he overhears a nurse direct someone to bring a patient record to Feinman, _she's covering Shepherd's patients while she's out of town._

He closes himself in his office and calls her.

She doesn't pick up.

_I miss you, Addison_, he says, but he doesn't leave a voicemail.

He just says it to his empty office.

* * *

_October_

* * *

"Mark?"

He almost hangs up; that's how surprised he is that she actually answered.

"You picked up," he says after a moment.

"Because you keep calling."

He listens to her breathing.

"You're back with him," he prompts.

"We're working on our marriage."

He snorts at the words, he can't help it, even when he hears her little inhale of hurt.

"You could have told me you were leaving," he says.

"I did tell you. I called you."

"From the fucking airport, Addison!"

He hears her inhale, again, at his raised voice.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," she says quietly.

"But you're not sorry for what you did."

Long moments of silence. He can picture her, the way she talks on the phone, sitting with one leg drawn up under her, one hand on her cell and the other fiddling with something. The hem of her shirt, a pillow if she's on the couch, a file if she's at her desk. Always doing something with her fingers.

He hears something in the background. A key, a door?

In this new world, does Derek actually come home? That would be the most surprising of all.

"I have to go," she says.

"Addison – "

But she's hung up.

He stares at the phone in his palm for a while afterwards.

He won't call her again.

* * *

_November_

* * *

He almost calls her on Thanksgiving. Almost.

He's remembering their third year of residency, when they had their first night off in four and staggered out into the unfamiliar night. They walked for blocks, confused why it was so hectic, streets roped off. It was the day before Thanksgiving, they were almost in Herald Square, and they hadn't even realized.

Time meant nothing then.

It means everything now.

He picks up the phone and puts it down again.

She's in Seattle, with Derek. She left a few pairs of shoes, some clothing, the note he tore up in a huff and tried to tape back together.

She's not coming back.

She's gone.

He turns the pages of the calendar. He skips the rest of 2005. Fuck 2005. Fuck the Macy's Parade picture for November, the Rockefeller Center tree for December, the Central Park skaters for March and most of all, fuck the two lovers kissing on the Brooklyn Bridge for February.

March, on the calendar, is nothing like the unpleasant one he remembers from 2005. March 2006, according to the tourist calendar, will feature a duck pond, and a hot dog vendor.

He rubs his thumb over the square for the 19th day. A little bit of the circle is faded now. He's touched it too much. Another couple months and maybe it will be gone altogether.

...

"Both Shepherds are gone for good, huh?"

It's an attending who was on sabbatical when everything went down. Lucky him.

Then again, Mark was there for everything and he's still piecing it together himself. A break like that leaves confusion behind. It leaves damage.

"They're in Seattle," he says. He's used to being the keeper of information about _DerekAndAddison_. Even when there was no more _DerekAndAddison_.

In Seattle.

Gone for good.

Three days after Thanksgiving he's digging at the bottom of his dry cleaning pile for a particular tie and sees she didn't take everything after all. She left behind one of those silky little nightgown things that's more like a slip. It's not something she'd wear now, not when the weather's turned cold and he never heats the apartment to her liking. It's lightweight, insubstantial, like the summer months.

But it's here. He weighs it in one palm. He tortures himself for a while going over the options: she didn't realize she left it – which is unlike Addison, so she was upset. Or she didn't plan to leave, and it was sudden. But she packed other things. Or she did it on purpose. To torment him? To comfort him?

It still smells like her.


	5. Winter

**WINTER**

* * *

_December_

* * *

The days are short.

His patience is short.

On the calendar, rosy-cheeked strangers skate around the rink in Central Park. It looks nice from afar, a glossy-cheap photo. None of the shouting and sweaty scent from the crush of tourists. Impatience and halitosis and the acrid odor of wet diapers. The calendar printers sprang for green ink for the 25th. _Christmas_, it says. Like he could forget if he tried, when it's shoved down his throat at work every day, on the sidewalk between there and his apartment.

Inside, he has a rule: no green, no pine. _Scrooge McSloan_ – he overhears it from an intern and pretended to be offended instead of grimly satisfied. He brings that same intern to his apartment and manages not to roll his eyes at her cheeriness, her optimism. It's nothing he wants around but she's pliant and flexible and willing and he's frustrated.

_You really don't like Christmas, _she giggles, and he swallows his annoyance. _No red or green here_, he says with mock-sternness, confiscating lacy underwear. She sleeps over without an invitation.

He sleeps on the couch.

Fitfully: attended by a lingering sense memory of Addison on that same couch, arching under him, her challenges an invitation.

It's the time of night when a man might do something stupid but his phone is in the bedroom with the intern he's already forgotten, so he's safe there, at least.

For now.

...

"It's Christmas Eve," Gloria reminds him. She's fifteen years older, at least, short and stocky and maternal, and he's had a special fondness for her since his fellowship days. Call a shrink, call it his lost childhood, call her a stand-in for Derek's cookie-cutter mother. Whatever.

"You don't say." He grins at her. "Is that why I saw some fat guy in a red suit skulking around Peds? So I shouldn't have called the cops on him?"

"Very funny, Dr. Sloan." Gloria frowns, no malice in her expression. "You are going to take some time off for the holidays, aren't you?"

"And miss seeing you? Never."

"I'm taking time off."

"And you didn't invite me for Christmas dinner." He pretends to be offended, then makes tracks before she can actually invite him – he wouldn't put it past her.

He has plans for Christmas.

...

His plans for Christmas: he's going to drink scotch and count down the moments until the Christmas trees turn into fragrant mulch at the perimeter of the park and everyone stops being so fucking festive all the time.

Eighty percent of the people, minimum, are faking it, that's the thing. Lies, damn lies, and fucking holiday cheer.

He's pouring out another shot when he realizes that not a Christmas has passed since his sixth without, at some point, seeing Derek.

He's never going to see him again.

He's never going to see _her _again.

_I'm not worth it_, that's what she said. Except Derek and Addison were all he had, and now he has nothing. If he gave up Derek to get Addison, and ended up alone, didn't he sacrifice everything? How can _everything_ not be enough?

He pours another shot, swallows fast enough to burn.

...

He's a little bleary when the phone rings.

_Merry Fucking Christmas_. He's actually going to answer that way, assuming it's a wrong number.

It's not.

"What's wrong?" he asks as soon as the line connects.

Because she's made it clear she wouldn't call otherwise.

She doesn't say anything.

"Addison? What's wrong?"

"… nothing."

He listens to her breathing.

"Derek is in love with an intern," she says finally, "and the only flight I could get is into Newark."

So two things, then.

"That sucks," he says simply.

"Which one?" She sounds exhausted, but amused too. A little.

"Both."

"Mark – "

"Maybe Newark won't be that bad," he says.

"That … would be nice."

...

He considers picking her up at the airport, making one of those – cardboard signs. Buying flowers. Aside from how little he wants to go to New Jersey, he decides against it. In his experience Addison doesn't actually want the big gestures. She wants the possibility of them, she wants to know the guy _would_ do them, but she really wants something else. Someone who's … where she expects.

So he stays put. If she wants to find him, she knows where to go.

There's no one in his apartment to see him watching the clock, but he avoids it anyway.

"I have Addison here for you," the doorman says when he calls up.

But she's not for him. Is she?

His stomach clenches anyway.

He's standing a foot from the door but he lets her buzz anyway before he pulls it open. She's wearing that big black coat with the fur collar that makes it look like she has wings. Like a bird of prey.

"A few months gone and they don't send me up anymore, I guess," she says, raising her eyebrows. "Does that mean you told them what happened?"

"I didn't tell them anything." He holds the door open. "Did you fly across the country just to test the building security?"

"No."

_Then why did you?_

He doesn't ask.

She has a suitcase with her, but it's one of those pristine little carry-ons. There's no way her whole Seattle life fits into that suitcase.

They look at each other, and then he takes a step back without inviting her in.

"Can I have a drink?" she asks quietly.

"I'm drinking scotch," he says, it's warning and consequence at once. _I'm not opening a bottle of wine for you. _

"Scotch is fine."

She drinks it fast, still wearing her coat, and when she finally unbuttons it he watches her emerge from its oversized lines looking small and tired.

She pauses, fisting the lapels on both side to expose her narrow frame, and stares at him.

"Stop looking at me like that," she says.

"Like what?"

"Like you're trying to picture me … pregnant."

It hits him hard in the gut. It's cruel. Unfair.

It's true, but it's still cruel.

And unfair.

He pours her another drink anyway. He watches her lean her hips against the bar and avoid his gaze.

"Why did you do it?" he asks.

She doesn't say, _which thing do you mean? _

She doesn't say anything at all.

"Addison."

"I thought you'd be happy to see me," she says, her tone suggesting she thought anything but.

"Like you were happy to take off to Seattle?"

"I wasn't happy."

"Were you testing me, Addison? You wanted to see if I'd still love you if you had the abortion?"

"Of course not." Her voice shakes. "It wasn't a test."

"If it wasn't a test, then how did I fail?"

She ignores him.

"I wanted you to stay," he reminds her. "You left."

"You _said_ you wanted me to stay."

"What's the difference?"

She blinks. "A lot. The difference is a lot."

"You left."

"I gave up everything." She grips the empty tumbler in one hand, the other playing with her necklace.

"And I don't have a best friend anymore," Mark says, "or – whatever you were. I don't have that either."

"I'm married," she whispers. "I was married."

"Yeah." He takes the empty glass from her hand. "You were married the last time too."

"I won't stay if you don't want me to," she tells him quietly.

He pauses. "Did you tell Derek you were leaving?"

"No." She looks down at her hands.

"The stealth cross-country. You hit me with that one too." He picks up the portable phone from its cradle and holds it out to her. "Call him," he says, more firmly, when she doesn't take it from his hand.

"He doesn't care where I am."

Mark shakes his head. "Don't play games. You do that passive-aggressive crap to Derek, that means you still want him to pay attention to you. It means you still want him."

"Mark – "

"And if you want him, you don't want me."

She looks anxious.

"Yeah, you have to choose. You didn't last time and you tore all three of us apart."

"It's my fault? All of this is my fault?"

He doesn't answer.

"Call him," Mark persists, "or you can go stay somewhere else. Like the sacred marital home."

"You're kicking me out?" Her voice rises, high and thin.

_Damn it._

"No." He sinks down on the couch. "I'm not kicking you out."

...

It would be easier if he could.

It would be easier if he could have forgotten her, months ago.

It would be easier if he could have refused her, before that.

Which is like saying it would be easier if he could be someone else, and she could too.

And then who would they be?

"I'm tired," she says. "It was a long flight."

He gives her the bedroom and then he pours himself another scotch and stares out the window at the lit-up skyline, trying to forget that he knows exactly what she looks like as she falls asleep.

It would be easier if he could.

...

He procrastinates only as long as it takes to finish his scotch before he makes the call.

"Shepherd."

"You picked up," he says, surprised.

"Yeah." He sounds grim. "I was going to call you, actually. You beat me to it. Have you heard from Addison? She isn't answering her phone."

"She's here."

Derek exhales hard, then says a few things Mark won't repeat to Addison.

" … I've ever met. After everything I did to – " He pauses. "I don't want to speak to you," Derek says as if he's just realized it's Mark on the other end of the phone.

"You want me to hang up?" Mark asks. He tries to sound like he's joking. Just pals. No one here who destroyed anyone else's life, no sir.

Derek's breathing sounds annoyed. "What I want has nothing to do with anything," he says tightly.

"I heard you're in love with an intern," Mark says. "Did you want that?"

There's silence for a moment. "That conversation … did not go well," Derek says finally.

"Can't imagine why." Mark massages the back of his neck. He's tired.

No one speaks for a few beats. Maybe this is how the conversation will end: no slamming down receivers, just … petering out. Just no longer existing.

Derek speaks first, though.

"Is she, uh, is she okay?"

He considers the question. Addison, last time he checked, is currently passed out in his bed. "In a manner of speaking, yes."

There's more silence.

"I didn't sleep with her," Mark says.

"I don't care."

"You didn't really care the last time either, I guess."

"Is that what she told you?"

There's an uncomfortable silence after Derek's question.

"Does she have a plan?" Derek asks next. "Beyond a public sulk?"

"I don't know how long she's staying, if that's what you mean." Mark pauses. "Doesn't she have a job in Seattle now?"

"Yes." Derek sounds exhausted. "She has a job in Seattle now."

"So she's coming back."

"I don't know. She didn't tell me her plans. But either way … it's over," Derek says. "It has to be over, now. It's time. You can tell her that, if you want to."

"I think you should be the one to tell her that."

"Fine." Derek pauses. "Look, I shouldn't have tried to – we made it worse. Addison and I, when we tried, we just made it worse. For both of us. She should have stayed in New York."

It's the first time in a while he and Derek have agreed.

"Well, she didn't stay. She ran after you," he reminds Derek.

Or she was running from Mark. Or the third option: no difference between the first two.

"And then she ran back," Derek says, "and now she should stay."

"Why are you telling me this? What – you're giving her to me? Like some handoff? I can have her?"

Derek pauses. "In a manner of speaking, yes," he says, using Mark's words from earlier.

Silence, on both ends of the phone.

"She still loves you, you know," Mark says finally.

"I know she does." For a moment, Derek just breathes into the phone.

"But you don't love her."

"I don't know if I do."

"You don't know?" Mark repeats, irritated.

He's being unfair. Derek must care on some level, enough to pick up the phone for Mark and to wonder if Addison is alive and that's a low bar, but it's something. Still, he can't help himself.

"You don't know if you love your wife. But you _do _know you love your intern."

"She's not my – " Derek stops, lowers his voice. "I fell in love," he says. "After you and Addison, after I left Manhattan, I fell in love. You want to judge that? Fine. The two people I never, _ever_ thought would betray me – did exactly that. Blew up my life. I came out here, started over, it was hard. It was new. And then Addison shows up here, and – "

"She blew up my life too," Mark says.

"So you're the victim?"

_No, that would be my kid._

He palms the phone, this close to telling Derek everything. Before that night, and after. The relationship. The abortion.

Everything he knows Addison still hasn't told him.

"Mark?"

He startles a little bit, hearing her voice.

_God_, that was close.

She's standing half a room away still, bare feet on his parquet floors, wearing what looks like the bottom half of her own silky pajamas and a t-shirt of his that he didn't offer her. Her hair is mussed from sleep and her eyes puffy as she focuses on him.

"Who are you talking to?" she asks nervously, shifting her weight.

On the other end of the phone, he can tell Derek heard her voice. "You want to talk to her?" he asks quietly as Addison approaches.

"No." Derek's voice is resigned, without malice. "Eventually, we'll need … but it doesn't have to be now."

"Is it Derek?" Addison whispers, next to him now. Her eyes are wide, sheened over with tears. He puts a hand up to her face, cupping her cheek, and she turns her head so she can rest her lips against his palm.

He can feel the weight of her exhaustion against his skin. Sadness, too.

He nods.

"Does he want to – " She stops talking and draws a shuddering breath. "Can you tell him – "

But she doesn't finish it. She doesn't tell him what to say to Derek. She just finally starts crying, hard enough to shake her whole body, and he ends the call hastily before he drops the phone, so he can catch her against him when she lets go.

...

At first they stand there while she hangs tightly to his waist and he keeps her upright; her body shakes against his and her tears wet his neck. She cries hard enough that it turns into coughing and he finally drags her toward the bathroom, convinced her coughs will turn to gagging. She heaves a few times but brings nothing up; her eyes are bloodshot when she straightens up.

It's exhausting, grief.

"You feel better?"

She doesn't answer.

"You want to go back to bed?" he suggests.

She looks at him. "Not by myself," she says.

"Addison."

"Not like that. It's okay, I just – " She stops talking. "What am I doing here?" she asks hoarsely.

"That's my line."

"I moved," she says, as if he never said anything at all, "I gave up everything, again. My husband is in Seattle."

"Your husband is in love with another woman," he reminds her – matter-of-factly, not cruelly.

She raises her eyes to meet his.

"And I'm in love with another man," she says.

Her tone is calm, even casual, but must see the seriousness of his own face when he looks at her. "Don't say that if you don't mean it," he warns her.

"I do mean it."

"Because I said I'd kick you out?" He rubs his jaw. "I was pissed off, Addison. I didn't mean it, you know that. You can stay here, I'll help you – figure it out, clear out the house, light Derek's crap on fire, whatever. You don't have to pretend to be in love with me."

"I'm not pretending, Mark." Her eyes glisten. "I was pretending _not_ to be in love with you, if anything."

...

In the morning his bed is empty.

He finds her sitting at the island in a kitchen that smells of fresh coffee, wearing her reading glasses and holding the _Times_.

"Morning," she says.

"Morning." He stands there, trying to get his bearings. It's not as hard as it should be. "You hungry?" he asks.

She looks down at the paper. "I could eat."

They eat, and then they talk.

They both know where _not talking _ends up.

"I'm a mess," she says, staring out his windows with a coffee cup in her hand. "I'm a wreck. I'm so far down I – I don't even know what direction to run. Which I guess is why I ran to Seattle, and then … ran back."

"Were you running from Derek?" he asks. "Or running to me?"

She looks at him with those big, sad eyes. "I just know that every day in Seattle hurt."

"That's all you know?"

"And I missed you. I know I missed you."

"I missed you too." He drains his coffee, sets down the empty mug. "There were so many times I considered just – buying a ticket and flying out there to bring you home."

She smiles a little through her tears. "Why didn't you?"

"Talked myself out of it," he admits. "Would you have come back with me, if I did?"

"I don't know."

He sees her eyes track the kitchen, land on his briefcase.

"I've left two jobs in two months," she says.

_And two men_, but he doesn't say it out loud.

"I have no idea what I'm doing." Her face is open, too exhausted for a mask.

_Stay_, that's what he told her the night Derek caught them.

"I was an idiot to think we could ever go back to normal. I don't even know what normal is anymore. I don't know what anything is anymore."

_Stay_, he wants to tell her again, but he just refills her coffee.

He has to work. Like it's an ordinary day when it's anything but. A towel around his waist, he pads barefoot into his bedroom to find her staring in the mirror.

She's just so slightly turned to the side, studying her profile, and he doesn't have to ask why.

"Do you regret it?"

That's all he asks.

"I regret a lot of things," she says.

...

The air is piney when he walks home, crisp and cold. Christmas tree mulch, already. He could walk a few blocks out of way to see the chopped up fir carcasses, but he doesn't.

Addison is still in his apartment when he gets there.

"You smell like Christmas," she says.

"Yeah." He looks down.

"You didn't buy a tree."

"I didn't want to break the streak."

She looks … disappointed, and it shouldn't get to him, but it does.

"Hey."

She looks up, and he holds out an arm. "Take a whiff," he says, and raises his eyebrows like he's teasing. She gives him an uncertain smile but she inches closer to him and inhales; he feels the warmth of her lips and the cold rush of air.

"The tree chopper," she says.

He nods.

"Smells like the real thing," she says. "Maybe even better."

He wraps an arm around her when she leans into him again and kisses the top of her head. Her hair smells fresh and clean, a little balsam fir still clinging to her.

"Better, really?"

"Different," she concedes. "Different … and better too."

* * *

_January_

* * *

He goes back to the brownstone with her. He expects it to be worse than it is, months after his last visit.

The housekeeper must have been coming in her absence.

It's clean and there's no visible dust but that's just the surface. Underneath there's something dark and lurking, hollow. Like a burned-out husk. Like something died here.

"I don't ever want to come back."

"You might need to," he tells her honestly. Two avoiders in one marriage – one divorce, whatever it is – maybe not the best idea.

"I know that." She fiddles with the catch on her bracelet. "_Need to_ isn't the same as _want to._"

* * *

_February_

* * *

February is long.

The days are short but the month is long.

A few more boxes of her things arrive. She puts on tailored suits and pins up her hair and goes on interviews. She wants _a fresh start. _She wants to _be somewhere no one knows us._

He wishes her luck with that but Manhattan is the smallest of towns sometimes, worse in medicine, and he overhears things about her at work, sometimes, that he'd reward with a fist if he didn't need to protect his hands.

...

"Chelsea Wellness." He raises his eyebrows at the description. "Private practice? Really?"

"It was nice," she says. "Slow pace."

"Since when do you like a slow pace?"

She shrugs. "I'm trying something different."

"What about surgery?"

"I have privileges at Lutheran. I'll operate when I need to."

But they don't operate when they _need to_, they operate when they _want to_.

"Addison. You don't have to quit faculty practice just because – "

But how to finish? _Because you quit Derek?_

"And it's twenty blocks from here," she says, still selling him on it like a recruiter. "I can walk to work."

...

"I had one patient today."

"One patient." He's pouring a glass of wine. "You?"

"Me." She takes a sip.

"What was that like?"

"Different," she says. She takes a sip and tilts her head, tasting it. She taught him to do that: how to sniff and savor it, taste and texture. And length, from beginning to mid-palate to finish. Those final notes at the end – once she showed him how to look for them, they were hard to miss.

"Different good, or different bad?"

"Different good." She stands on her tiptoes in her stockinged feet to kiss him and he tastes blackberries, maybe a little oak.

* * *

_March_

* * *

In his office, alone, he flips a generic cardstock page in his office planner: a new month.

Somewhere in the back of a dresser drawer is the calendar he won't turn to the new month. He remembers the picture, though. He probably always will, even if he'd like to forget. On that cheap-glossy paper, a shot of Gothic Bridge in the unidentifiable haze somewhere in the lion-lamb spectrum. The trees on the bridle path are neither bare nor green. It's neither winter anymore nor actually spring. It's somewhere in between.

And a different square on the calendar, now: she has a court date in early March.

"Can't you just – file it?" he asks. "Have the lawyers take care of it?"

She can, she says. But it's faster if he appears too. Why drag it out?

_When something is over, it should just be over._

They argue about whether he should come with her.

"You don't trust me?" she asks, closing the glasses cabinet harder than she needs to. "You think I'm going to jump him in the courtroom?"

"No." He looks at her; she's breathing heavily. "But not because you have such a strong track record."

"Screw you."

He deserves that, he decides, and lets her slam her way into the bedroom – the one that used to be his bedroom. He gives her a little while to sulk before he goes to find her.

She's looking out the window.

"Addison."

She doesn't turn around. "The glass is dirty," she says.

He shrugs. "They clean it in the spring."

"Once a year isn't enough. You should put a note in the system."

"Yeah, I'll add it to the list." He's standing behind her now, close enough to feel the heat of her body.

After a few minutes like that she turns around and links her arms around his neck, resting her cheek against his chest.

...

On an ordinary day in March, he ends the longest period he's gone without seeing Derek since kindergarten.

Derek looks older. He figures this is what happens when you spend time apart, and back together. The elastic band holding you in stasis snaps, and every line is visible. His hair is different too. Longer. And that's not all that's different.

He seems – calmer, maybe. Lighter.

He nods a greeting to Mark; it's neutral, a little impersonal, but it's not outwardly hostile.

_My marriage is over. It was over a long time ago, before we – before everything. I just didn't see it. Or I saw it, but I didn't want to see it. _

He sits in the back of the gallery and watches.

It's like a perverse reflection of the wedding. A funhouse mirror. Addison and Derek side by side, an officiant double-checking that they want this – this permanent change to their relationship.

This new, uncharted future.

_I do, _they said then.

Now they don't.

But it's clean and civil, fifty-fifty: they agree on everything. They agree on this.

Outside, after, she gives one and then the other of them a shaky smile. She has no words, it seems, so he speaks.

"Are you, uh, are you flying back now?" Mark asks, hearing how stupid that question sounds once he says it. His palms are actually sweating.

"Tomorrow," Derek says without emotion. "I'm going to see my mother first."

"Oh. Good."

For a moment the three of them just stand there on the courthouse steps while other people bustle by.

Mark has the sense of something untying. A loosening. It's the last time, maybe, that the three of them will stand together. He tries, and fails, to access a memory of the first time. He and Derek were a matched set already; Derek and Addison had an instant connection and she had to take him, along with Derek. _As is_, that's how she got him.

That first meeting, though – it would have been early in their medical school days, but it doesn't stand out.

This stands out.

This, he'll remember.

"I should get going," Derek says, glancing at his watch.

"Right – right, of course." Addison is half-stammering now in that way she does sometimes, tilting her head up at Mark for his approval, and he smiles at her like this severing isn't killing a part of him too.

"Travel safe. And give – give your mom my best." Addison is looking down at her hands, twisting them, and then looks up again at Derek. "And, um, and Meredith too."

Derek's face softens at the name _Meredith. _And then his eyebrows lift – just a hair, just enough for people who know him as well as Mark and Addison to notice. "Okay," he says. "I will."

Addison smiles a little, though she still looks nervous. Mark watches Derek watching her, maybe seeing her for the first time in a while. Or the last: funny how those two things can sometimes look the same.

"Take care, Addison," Derek says.

Mark just stands there.

He watches as the two of them actually … hug, a quick formal sort of thing, one arm, nothing too personal crushed up against anything else. A co-worker's embrace. The kind that's not really a hug or a kiss either, just a stamp or a seal.

_Goodbye_, it says.

_It's official_, just like the gavel.

Derek even reaches out to shake Mark's hand next, the male version of that embrace. He hopes his damp palms aren't noticeable.

He wants to say _I'm sorry_ but he doesn't, and he doesn't have enough time to think of anything else to say.

He just watches Derek hail a cab, slide in and then watches until the taxi disappears from sight.

Addison leans against him, so that he feels rather than sees her exhale of relief.

And then they go back to work.

...

She pounces on him that night, furious and fast.

She ignores him when he tries to talk to her, annoyed when he pushes it. _You can finish yourself off, then_, she snaps.

_This angry divorcee thing … it's kind of hot. I could get used to it. _He says it to piss her off and it works. She swings a leg over his, a challenge.

She narrows her eyes.

_Did you like me better, when I was Derek's? _

She doesn't say: … _before I was yours._

She doesn't say: _I'm yours now._

He takes her bare left hand in his and pins it over her head. _I've always liked you,_ he says. _I've liked you forever._

_Except when you don't_, she says.

He can't contradict that; she's made it impossible. He quiets her with his body instead of his words.

Afterwards, when she's getting her breath back while he traces the curve of her side, he reminds her: _my bike is still in the basement of the brownstone._

She rolls over to look at him. _You waited too long_, she says, _we sold the place as is. It's not your bike anymore._

_As is. _Take what you get, and that's it.

Sounds about right.

...

A week or so later, her copies of the signed order arrive in the mail. She holds up the tri-folded papers for him to see.

"Congratulations," he says. She salutes him with a half-drunk wine glass.

"Now … I get to do the rounds," she tells him.

"The rounds?"

She points to the box she checked – taking back her maiden name.

_Maiden name_, such an uncomfortably antiquated word. A prettied up way of saying _delete the Shepherd. _

Delete the hyphen.

Fuck everything.

"Is it a lot?" he asks.

"The DMV will be the worst of it."

"Can't you just – do it by mail?"

"No. I have to go in person … you know, for penance. Adulterous bitch and all that." Her tone is jocular; her face isn't.

"Derek won't have to do any of this," he predicts.

She shrugs. "It was my choice to take his name," she says.

Unspoken: _I didn't know this was how it would end._

...

He hears her take a patient's call from the window seat in the living room, one leg drawn up under her: "This is Dr. Montgomery," she says.

_Dr. Montgomery._

Whoever that is. He hasn't seen Dr. Montgomery since 1994.

Dr. Montgomery had full rosy cheeks and a voluble laugh. She was an intern with more enthusiasm than skill.

When her new driver's license arrives in the mail, _Addison Forbes Montgomery_, she makes a face at the picture. "I look so old," she says.

"You look great," he corrects her.

He means it, but he still expects her to question him.

She doesn't.

...

_In like a lion, out like a lamb –_ but it's another chilly March. Another long winter. At night, the wind rattles the bare branches with their blank spots where buds will grow. She finds his hand under the covers and grips it tightly.

He finds himself counting down the days of March. Not toward anything – not anymore.

Toward everything.

Toward a reckoning.

He just hopes it doesn't snow.

...

The nineteenth arrives, even without a mark on its calendar square.

He sits bellied-up to a bar where he's never been, drinking beers he can't taste.

A blonde eyes him from a stool halfway down.

It would be so easy.

To distract her, and himself, while he still can. _Once a manwhore, always a manwhore. _

"Rough day?" the bartender asks. She has a little silver hoop in her nose.

_You have no idea. _

He just grimaces.

It's the closest he's come in months. He wants to forget; he wants to bury himself as deep as his feelings in a stranger with no baggage. He wants simple.

Uncomplicated.

Tension and release and it's done.

And a part of him wants to go home smelling of unfamiliar shampoo, a whiff of perfume that isn't hers. Wants to hurt her back. He could do it.

She avoided him this morning, bustling to work with a whistle of wind and closed door before they had to look at each other.

She knew.

...

But she's there when he goes home.

She touches his face – her hands are always cold but now they're warmer than his chilled skin from the walk. March: you never know what to expect.

He doesn't speak.

"Mark … please don't hate me," she whispers. "I already hate me and that's hard enough – but I don't think I can do it if you hate me too."

He doesn't ask what _it _is.

She's wearing silky pajama bottoms – hers – but the tee shirt on top is his, worn soft with half the serifs missing on _UConn_.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, "Mark, I'm sorry I hurt you, you have to know I hurt me too, I think about her too," and even in the baggy shirt it's the most naked he's ever seen her.

She tastes like wine and tears when he kisses her.

On the bed that was _my bed_ and is now _our bed_ she's all big wet eyes and need. He touches her, strips off the layers of clothing – his and hers – until there's nothing left between them.

Under his fingers, her skin feels hot and damp like her whole body has been crying.

He traces her flat stomach with both hands, spells the word _empty _with his tongue.

They lie side by side afterwards. Her hands are folded behind her head, the angle stripping flesh from her arms. She looks fragile, breakable, her gaze on the ceiling.

She lay in this bed, in that spot, pregnant with their child. _I'm not fragile, Mark. I'm still me._

Neither of them speaks.

"You forgave me," she says finally; her voice is sad, but it's soft too, with something like wonder.

Carefully, with one hand, he touches her jaw. She turns her head enough to rest her cheek in his palm.

"You finally noticed," he says.


	6. Spring, Again

**SPRING, AGAIN**

* * *

_April_

* * *

"Walk with me," she says.

Like that, no question mark, like she thinks he'll say yes.

He does.

They turned the calendar yesterday, from March to April.

A new blank page.

In the post-dawn light, he sees new buds on the trees.

The cold spell at the end of March didn't kill them after all, and spring has officially started. The worst of it should be over now.

The buy iced coffees at a café on the way and she tucks her hand into his arm; she's playing with the straw, that impossibly distracting mobile mouth, but doesn't drink much.

"I, um … I have to tell you something," she says.

Over her whispered words, he hears his first bird call of the spring. She must hear it too, because she pauses, tilts her head a little.

"Listen to that," she says.

There's a slow smile on her face despite the tears in her eyes.

It remains even when a light rain starts to fall; he doesn't have an umbrella so she gives him hers and then tucks herself under his arm so they can share it while he holds it over both their heads.

He sees a drop splash on the shoulder of her trench coat, and pulls her a little further into his body so she's protected from the rain.

"Stay close," he says, and she does.

He extends a palm outside the umbrella when they get to the glassed in door of her office. "So much for the good weather," he says ruefully, tilting the umbrella to cover her while she slides her key into the lock.

She looks up at him. "It might not rain for long."

He watches her once she's inside, through the glass. The new bud of her, the springtime that's started between them.

It ends up raining for the rest of the day … but it doesn't matter. He can still hear the birds.


	7. A New Spring

**A NEW SPRING **

* * *

_April_

* * *

"Look, birds!"

Her little face is turned up to the sky. He tips his too: overhead, there's a soaring v of wings, pointing toward the sun.

"I can _hear_ them too," she beams. "Listen!"

He smiles. "Listen to that," he affirms, wonder in his voice, like she was the first to hear it. Sometimes it feels like she's the first to do everything. That's kids, he's learning: they see everything for the first time.

The birds are soaring on the wind and he remembers the when he learned they do that, sometimes, just playing. That flying isn't always a chore.

Their song is noisy, unavoidable.

"Are they talking to each other?" she asks.

He nods.

She listens, little head cocked. "It just sounds like singing." She pauses. "Do they understand each other?"

"I guess so," he says, indicating the group, "since they're all moving together."

She watches them fly, nodding her acceptance: "But where are they going?"

"Actually, I think they're coming back, sweetheart."

"Oh. From where?"

"Somewhere warm," he says. "Remember, they holed up for the winter. Got all … hunkered down and cozy."

She seems to like this, repeating his words. _Hunkered down and cozy. _

"Because it was too cold here?" she asks.

It's been a long winter.

"Too cold for the birds," he says, "not for us."

"Why?"

"Because birds are different from us." He ruffles her blonde hair. She started the day with a prissy bow in it, as usual, but it tends to slip halfway down after a few hours, making her look a little rugged. It's cute.

"Were they in Jamaica?" she asks. "It's warm there. Alvita said."

"Maybe." He smiles down at her.

"But now they're back 'cause it's warm enough here." She nods decisively at her own hypothesis, his little botanist, then glances up at him. "'Cause it's spring. Right, Daddy?"

"Right again."

He takes her tiny backpack in his hand before he pushes the revolving door for her – she's not even starting kindergarten until September, she's not exactly carrying around chem textbooks, but she loves that bag so he doesn't complain. Just watches her skip a few steps ahead in her little blue wool coat with its round collar and wooden buttons.

The doorman leans down a bit to greet her by name, then looks up at Mark. Sunshine is slashing through the lobby, reflecting off the marble floors. So it really is spring, then.

"Welcome home," the doorman says with a broad smile, tipping his cap. He points to the elevators. "Funny – Dr. Montgomery went upstairs not five minutes ago."

The little girl beams at the mention of her mother's name. Kids, he's learned, are like puppies. Happy to see you even when they just saw you. _Daddy! _she says in the morning, an exclamation, or _Mommy!_. depending on who wakes up first. Like that. Like she's excited just that they exist.

The doorman shakes his head now, looking amused. "You just missed each other," he says.

"That's okay," Mark tells the doorman, taking his daughter's small hand and leading her to the elevators. "We'll catch up."

* * *

**_end_**

* * *

_Thank you so much for reading - I hope you enjoyed and followed the format and didn't mind indulging in some vintage sad Maddison plus a happy ending. I would love to hear what you think - you know how to find me. _

_Oh, and the prompt was Addison flying back to Mark after Derek's Christmas confession. The first line of this story scribbled in my notes was, "Derek's in love with an intern. And the only flight I could get was into Newark." The rest grew from there. And, of course, song lyrics are from Regina Spektor's "Fidelity," the ode to sad Maddison we all know and love to cry about._


End file.
